Caring for justice

A Christan Jewish and Muslim interfaith group has a proposal it thinks will take the heat out of Victoria’s controversial proposed relationships register: have a register but remove all reference to sex.

The bill, being debated in Parliament this week, will establish a relationships register that effectively gives homosexual and de facto couples the same benefits as married couples in areas such as inheritance, tax and social security law, plus property division and maintenance.

NB: I’ve updated this post at the end.

Rabbi Shimon Cowen, spokesman for The Ad Hoc Interfaith Committee, says removing reference to sex will still provide the desired rights to homosexuals. It will also broaden the concept, as the Government originally said it intended but left out of the legislation, to include relationships between invalids and carers or elderly siblings living together in a household.

“Marriage, a committed sexual union of a man and a woman, is a whole series of legal relationships. It’s not only sexual union and loyalty but a financial responsibility to each other during and after the relationship,” Dr Cowen says.

“We don’t want to endorse homosexual union with this significance, but let them have all the benefits through contracts so they have the entitlements.”

The Ad Hoc Interfaith Committee has Catholic, Uniting, Presbyterian, Anglican, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim representatives.

It attracted attention when it wrote to every state MP in December opposing what it claimed was “social engineering” in the state reproductive technology legislation.

It has written to Premier John Brumby about the Relationships Bill, saying it is wrong to focus only on couples rather than other people in interdependent relationships and also to require sexual intimacy as a criterion to establish the relationship.

The Tasmanian legislation – which served as a model for Victoria’s bill and has been cited approvingly by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – provided both for “significant” relationships for couples regardless of gender, and “caring” relationships involving domestic support and personal care without payment. Dr Cowen, son of former Governor General Sir Zelman Cowen, says the interfaith committee would prefer a single category of interdependence to meet all needs.

This seems to me an entirely sensible proposal. It ends a painful discrimination against homosexual couples but also extends the protection to vulnerable members of the community who suffer the same lack of protection but do not have such a powerful voice. At the same time it does not threaten the particular position of marriage so important to religious groups and many other Australians too.

advocacy group, says the religious leaders’ support for the register is marvellous spiritual leadership. “It’s absolutely wonderful, as much as anything for the symbolic value for members of the gay community, older members of whom faced criminalisation and associated social stigma, and younger members who are looking for acceptance and validation at this difficult time in their lives,” she says.

But gay philosopher and devout Catholic John Heard says the unnecessary insistence on including a sex test in the bill isthe product of an extreme “homo-activist” ideology.

In a speech on Tuesday night to the Melbourne Catholic Lawyer’s Association, Mr Heard said: “The only reason to to include a sex test is to elevate a (homosexual) sex act to equality with procreative sex.”

He says said the proposed bill is relatively modest but should still be opposed because it threatens marriage and family. Nor has the Tasmanian model worked, he says, having attracted only 86 couples on the register and one carer’s relationship.

What do you think? Are there important principles at stake besides the obvious one of justice? Should the Government rethink the bill to extend these rights, or should sexual relationships be recognised as a separate category? What are the key aspects that make particular relationships special and worthy of legal recognition?

Posted by Barney Zwartz March 11, 2008 10:22 AM

http://blogs.theage.com.au/thereligiouswrite/archives/2008/03/caring_for_just.html