With a week to go to the committee stage of the Civil Partnership Bill in the Dáil the campaign against the bill increases.
Today Cóir published their report on the Bill and the 20 page document outlines their opinion on the impact of the bill on family breakdown and even an ageing Europe. Gay relationships don’t last as long as heterosexual unions and they have ‘research’ (no citations or bibliography of course) which says we have more sexual partners than heterosexuals. The campaign against the bill is not just about the fact that people working in jobs which invovle registering relationships might be expected to do their jobs, no Cóir want the whole thing scrapped because there are not a lot of gays, not all gays take up the option when offered and the government should be doing more to support the family .
You can read it here - comments with your favourite bit of makey uppey bullshit are of course welcome.
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Apparently the cp bill “will introduce enormous change without any public demand for that”
Ahem, Coir are obviously unaware of the huge groundswell of suport for equality within the gay community – someone dispatch any edition of GCN from the last year to them post haste!
As for enormous change – where do you start with that?!
Are straight people suddenly going to cast off their previously perfect nuclear families and shack up with someone else of their own sex, just cos they can?!
The only people it’s going to affect are um gay people, whether those in couples or those struggling to come out.
I was prompted to find out the impact factor of “The Journal of Happiness”.
It doesn’t have one apparently as I don’t think its that long in existence. Go figure!
Getting your unpublishable shite into a new journal is a great method of getting guff that should never see the light of day, published.
The whole report makes for some excellent light-hearted reading though. “Oh don’t bother giving the gays rights, sure there aren’t very many of them… “.
* Facepalm..
Em Grace – there is a significant other part of the bill dealing with cohabitation for same sex and opposite sex couples
Obviously marriage is better for kids, the couple on the front are showing their child a book about the internet, not ‘Anne and Barry’ like those of us who co-habit (or ‘Noddy’ if you happen to be gay). And I’m only presuming it’s their child, after all he isn’t wearing a wedding ring in the other photo.
I don’t speak Irish but is Coir the gaelic word for the politics of shite?
From flicking through it all they are basically doing is making a completely spurious connection between marital breakdown (or non-starting) and CP which isn’t really evidenced anywhere. The “studies” they quote in the UK have no evidence whatsoever that partnership laws there were in any way connected, or that by not having them would have made any difference. People like them conveniently ignore the fact that the only people whose lives will be (a little) different from this is people with same sex partners. Suggesting otherwise is just completely without foundation.
The only way you could reliably do any kind of study into the impact of partnership laws is to compare somewhere without those laws (eg California) with somewhere which does have them. Doing a historical study is pointless because the causal factors in a social trend often have nothing to do with minute changes like partnership laws in the form we have.
I find it amusing that the likes of Coir claim that the CP Bill will undermine marriage, and in the same breath essentailly say that childless marriages are pointless and could have been done without – sure couldnt the two have just come to an adult arrangement?