Marriage equality was won once and for all in England and Wales five years ago. On 29 March 2014, dozens of same-sex couples stepped blinking into the camera flashes and out the other side into their new married lives, with the same legal status as their straight peers – right? Well, not quite. It’s true that today marks five years since the government stopped telling people who they could and could not marry on the basis of gender. But it continues to dictate who has the right to love – it’s just that now, that judgement is based on income.
We have a personal stake in the fight for marriage equality. We’re a British lesbian couple who married in Canada in 2003. On returning home, we found ourselves ‘unmarried’ again – our marriage wasn’t legally recognised here. Two years later, with the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act, it was deemed a civil partnership. This is not what we wanted – any heterosexual couple who married abroad would automatically have their marriage recognised as such in their home country. So, supported by Liberty and OutRage!, we went to the High Court in 2006 seeking a declaration of the validity of our marriage as a marriage. We lost our case. The judge acknowledged discrimination, but said it was justified in order to protect the institution of traditional, heterosexual, marriage.
That judgment didn’t stand the test of time. Eight years later, in 2014, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act came in, and our marriage was legally recognised in our home country, alongside those of many other same-sex couples now able to marry for the first time. Today is the five-year anniversary of that historic day.
