It’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day, and since Clark is frantically reading reading for her assignment which is due Wednesday (yes, she’s the kind of person who leaves everything to the last minute), it falls to me to blog for the cause – so to speak.
Owlie and Plump have posted about how excited they are about the upcoming changes in legislation at state and federal level. I have mixed feelings about what it means for us.
Yes, at federal level they are promising that we will have financial recognition almost exactly equal to a de facto relationship. Yes, they are claiming that we can now list each other as beneficiaries for superannuation and not have to fear that it won’t be paid to our partners because the trustees are bigots. Yes, they are saying that partners of service veterans will now be entitled to claim their partners pensions. But will it even happen? The coalition (opposition party) is trying desperately to stall the legislation from passing through the senate.
I honestly don’t think, that if these laws even manage to get through both houses of parliament, that it’s going to have any great positive impact on our family. We’re still not recognised as a family by the federal government. We’re still not entitled to access the family court.
Our state government made many elaborate promises last year that same sex couples would have access to ART, that we would have recognition on birth certificates of our children, that we would have rights to and responsibilities for the children that we parent, whether they are ours biologically or not. Lets just say, they promised big and delivered little. We were told last December that these changes would be in effect by mid this year. Well people, it’s now June – that officially qualifies as mid-year. Where are our new laws?
All they’ve been focussing on is the relationship register issue. They think they’re being so liberal and open-minded and talking about allowing us to register ourselves as a couple. Much like I register my dog with the local council. Should I get a belled collar and a tag, and enrol myself in obedience school? Even in Canberra, where they have been fighting for years to bring in a civil union, they have now been muzzled by the federal government. The newspapers have been touting the first same sex unions, but this is the message we’re really getting:
“Effectively, the couple have signed a stat dec (statutory declaration),” she told reporters. The differences between a marriage ceremony and a commitment ceremony were quite different, she said. “This is a process of registration. I’ve just registered, effectively, the civil partnership,” Ms Krajina said. “Marriage is performed under a completely separate piece of legislation. This is just a registration process.”
And the relationship register is just a record of a relationship between two people. What about our children?
We have friends who argue with us that this is the first step and we’re on the way to full equality etc etc. Well, I just want to say, I’ll believe it when I see it. We’ve been fighting for equality between the sexes for decades now, centuries even, and in many ways in this country women are worse off than they were 20 or 30 years ago. It’s actually going backwards.
So I’m not sure that our family is safe. It’s hard to provide a safe and stable environment for your children when you don’t feel like you have a safe and secure place in society.
And yet… And yet, for all that, I am so thankful that we were born into a society which is at least open-minded enough that we don’t have to fear for our physical safety every minute of every day. I’m thankful that we can embrace who we are, love who we love, and aren’t trapped into hiding ourselves, being forced to marry. We may not be officially recognised as a family, but at least we’re not officially proscribed and imprisoned or executed, as happens in too many countries. At least we could, in our own way, decide to add to our family and make it happen.
So we have much that is good, and much that is not so good.
[…] *PBX Makes Four: Blogging for LGBT Families Day […]
[…] Not that we’re in the least bit surprised, but we had at least hoped that in this case our extreme cynicism was […]