The Evangelical Alliance Ireland has issued a statement encouraging Evangelical Christians to support the new Civil Partnerships Bill 2009, which extends the rights and privileges of marriage to homosexual couples who register their partnerships.
Last week, the Irish Parliament read and debated the Civil Partnership Bill 2009, introduced by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern. The Minister said that the Bill would give homosexual couples the same rights as married heterosexual couples to questions of home, inheritance, tax, pension, medical care and access to state benefits as well as the same right to demand financial support from wealthier partners when relationships fail.
(Click here to access the Bill)
The Evangelical Alliance Ireland’s statement asserts that ‘the Bill is the Government’s response to the fact that same-sex couples are now a part of life in Ireland and to political pressure to legislate for [homosexual] marriage.’ The statement goes on saying that Evangelical Christians should respond by supporting ‘the basic thrust of the Bill,’ as ‘the Government is seeking to legislate for greater justice and fairness for co-habiting couples, both same-sex and opposite-sex couples.’
(Click here to read the statement)
‘[a]s followers of a just and compassionate God we can recognise the justice and fairness of providing some legal protection for the reality of both same-sex and opposite-sex cohabiting relationships.’
In the section Why do we say this?, it says:
The ‘... Gospel requires us that we show grace to those who fundamentally disagree with our convictions and who do not shape their lives according to what we believe is good for them.’
The statement tries to re-assure Christians that the Bill ‘does not redefine marriage’ and ‘does not directly challenge the traditional understanding of marriage in Ireland.’
However, despite the Alliance’s assurances, some homosexual activists in the Republic of Ireland have already expressed their dissatisfaction with the Bill because it does not grant them full marriage rights and a right to adopt children. They say the Bill in its present form creates a second-class citizenship for homosexuals.
Dr Mark McCarron, spokesman for the homosexual organisation Noise, said while the new legislation would grant some important rights to homosexual couples it would not equal civil weddings. He said:
‘The Civil Partnership bill will simply function to further marginalise gay and lesbian people, telling them their relationships are lesser than those of heterosexuals. The most disgusting omission from the bill is the fact it ignores gay and lesbian people have children,’ he said.
MarrigEquality, a group that argues for full recognition of homosexual ‘marriages’, complained that the Bill institutionalises discrimination. Moninne Griffith, the group’s director, said that ‘civil partnership without the option to marry sends a clear message out to the public that the government do not consider gay and lesbian relationships to be equal.’
With the Alliance’s stance on the issue, opposition to the Bill is virtually non-existent. The Bill is likely pass into law in December this year with widespread support from opposition parties Fine Gael and Labour as well as the governing coalition of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party.
Irish Evangelicals are far from unanimous on the issue. Another group, Aontas, a Christian group previously known as the Association of Irish Evangelical Churches, criticised the Alliance’s stance. Pastor Paudge Mulvihill, the group’s Honorary Secretary, said that they remain ‘opposed to the Civil Partnership Bill because it undermines the status of marriage’.
Homosexuality was de-criminalised in Ireland in 1993 after the country was taken to the European Court of Human Rights by a former university lecturer David Norris, a practicing homosexual who is now a senator in the Upper House of Ireland’s Parliament. He claimed in the case that the criminalisation of male-to-male sex infringed on his right to privacy.