by Rex Wockner
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
A lesbian couple who tried to get a marriage license were turned away at the Greenwich registry office in southeast London on Nov. 2.
Sharon Ferguson and Franka Strietzel were told that only opposite-sex couples can marry, even though the United Kingdom's civil-partnership law lets same-sex couples enter into a union that grants rights and obligations identical to those of marriage.
Ferguson and Strietzel plan to sue the government for violations of the Human Rights Act's rights to marriage, to respect for family life and to protection from discrimination.
They will be joined by three other same-sex couples who plan to seek marriage licenses and by four heterosexual couples who want to enter into one of the nation's gay-only civil partnerships.
"No matter how good civil partnerships are with regard to the legal protections and rights they provide, they are still a separate system that was put together to stop gay and lesbian people from being able to marry," said Ferguson. "Like most people in this world, we were brought up to believe that one day we'd fall in love and get married. This is what we want to do and our sexual orientation should not be an impediment."
The challenges to both laws are part of a new activist campaign called Equal Love, which also seeks to open up the civil-partnership law to straight couples.
"We see the Equal Love campaign as a historic quest for justice – morally equivalent to the campaigns to overturn the bans on interracial marriage in apartheid South Africa and the Deep South of the USA," said coordinator Peter Tatchell. "The ban on same-sex civil marriage and on opposite-sex civil partnerships is a form of sexual apartheid — one law for gay couples and another law for heterosexual partners. Two wrongs don't make a right."
Same-sex marriage is legal in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Mexico City, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C.
