Via Pink News: Hungarian government proposes registered same-sex partnerships. I’ve read this article a number of times, and, from what I’m understanding, gay people are being offered marriage in the most backhanded way imaginable:
The Hungarian Government has approved a new bill on registered partnerships. It replaces a previous law on registered partnership that was struck down by the Constitutional Court in December, just weeks before its was due to come into force.
The new bill introduces the institution of registered partnership only for same sex couples and a scheme of domestic partnership registration for both same sex and different sex couples. Support for the bill in the Parliament is still an open question.
The Court found that creating an institution similar to marriage for both same sex and different sex couples duplicates the institution of marriage for different sex couples, and thus contradicts the special protection of marriage enshrined in the Constitution.
Doesn’t this seem unnecessarily complicated? If I am understanding this correctly, to avoid a duplication of the marriage institution between a man and a woman, this new bill prevents a man and a woman from entering into a domestic partnership that is offered to same-sex couples.
But if the domestic partnership institution being offered to gay people would be considered marriage if it occurred between straight people, then isn’t the institution being offered to gay people also marriage? And, if so, why not just call it that?
This feels like an example of “equal is separate.” It also feels like an example of the language games that get played when trying to re-frame the marriage equality argument. And those games are becoming more and more labyrinthine as the logic used to prevent gay people from obtaining equal rights continues to fail. When reason fails, bury the failure in words!
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