Britain | Gay marriage

They do

Same-sex couples are choosing marriage over civil partnership

A RAINBOW parade will whirl through London on June 27th to mark Pride, a weeklong gay jamboree. Britain’s “LGBTQ+ community”, the term used by the march’s organisers to cover the ever-broadening spectrum of human sexuality, has plenty to celebrate. Since 2005 gay couples have been able to form civil partnerships, marriages in all but name. Since 2014 they have also been allowed to wed (except in Northern Ireland).

Civil partnerships already conferred marriage-like rights and obligations. So before the parliamentary vote on equal marriage in 2013 traditionalists such as Philip Hammond, now the foreign secretary (who declined to fly the rainbow flag over British embassies this week, in contrast to his predecessor), opposed the law on the basis that “there was no huge demand for this”. It turns out that they were wrong. Given the choice, most gay couples are opting to marry—and many in civil partnerships are converting.

Last year the Office for National Statistics reported that 1,409 gay couples tied the knot in the first three months of the new law. That was nearly as many as formed civil partnerships during the same period a year earlier. But because no new data on civil partnerships were released, it was hard to know whether the marriage boom represented a change in behaviour or simply a short-term boost in demand.

More recent evidence suggests gay couples are indeed swapping civil partnerships for marriage. In Brighton, a proudly pink city that has granted more gay unions than any other council, marriage is nearly four times as popular as civil partnership (see chart). Westminster used to grant more than 200 partnerships a year. Last year it carried out only 38, versus 131 same-sex marriages. Islington, another gay-friendly London borough, has performed 137 gay weddings so far this year, and only 24 civil partnerships.

Since December couples have been able to convert existing civil partnerships to marriages. No national data have yet been released, but Brighton reports that by April 267 couples had converted—equal to about one in five of all the civil partnerships the city has ever granted.

Gay-rights groups, which fought for years to get civil partnerships, are in no rush to abolish them. Nor are conservatives: the Church of England, for instance, sees them as preferable to gay marriage. Last year a government consultation on their future shrugged its shoulders. So they will go on—but they are already becoming rare. In February Brighton performed only one.

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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "They do"

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