I continue to be amazed at the things that people can get away with when it comes to Othering same sex marriage.
Little Britain star Matt Lucas and his partner Kevin McGee were "married" in a civil ceremony at the private member's club Home House in London.
Later, the "newlyweds" dressed as Aladdin and Prince Charming for their pantomime-themed wedding reception.
Actually, BBC, Matt Lucas had a wedding, where he married his partner. No inverted commas; that's just simple fact.
Now, I don't mean to pick on Britney Spears (I really don't), but if we look at the reporting on her wedding, which was annulled, we can see that it was not written about in the same way by the BBC:
The man who married Britney Spears has spoken about their surprise marriage, which was annulled less than 55 hours after the pair tied the knot.
They tied the knot, everyone!
The BBC also did the same thing here and here.
P.S. I realise that these are not weddings in the religious sense, but civil partnership ceremonies. My point is that civil partnership ceremonies between a man and a woman (eg Spears' wedding) are not written about the same way as same-sex ones.
P.P.S. It turns out that Lucas and McGee are no longer together, just in case you were wondering.
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The BBC are right.
Civil partnership is not the same as marriage (don't ask me what the differences are though). Britney Spears did get married; that fact did not change when the marriage was later annuled.
I think that in Britain there is no legal difference between civil partnership and marriage besides the name. But there IS still a legal difference in name, and the BBC has to be accurate when reporting on legal statuses.
There's no difference here. You can get married in a church, your backyard, use a priest, JP, whatever.
It never fails to amaze me how many people are comfortable Otherizing gays. How come my atheist self and my atheist husband can get married in our kitchen with a JP and signed license, and still be called MARRIED and no one gets up in our faces about it? Nobody warned us that, uh-oh! you guys will actually be a "civil partnership", not "married", sorry! It's a marriage, end of story.
The people I tell this to just don't GET the damaging effect Otherizing has on those being Othered. They think, what the heck's the big deal, it's just a word! NO, it's not just a word, and it IS a big deal!
Where is here?
According to Wikipedia, "No country of the United Kingdom offers same-sex marriage, though all countries provide civil partnerships to same-sex couples that provide all the legal consequences of marriage."
So the difference is in name only, but there is still a legal distinction between the two terms, and the BBC has to be accurate. It makes more sense to get mad at the government for making separate but equal designations than it does to get mad at the BBC for reporting on it.
I'm in America, in New England. You're right, same sex marriage isn't yet allowed in my state (>:(), I wasn't entirely clear in my original post. What I meant was that heteros could get married any way they want, religiously or no, but if gays want the same rights, all of a sudden the religious folk are all up in their business about the word "marriage" meaning a holy sacrement and how marriage is for the production of children, etc. But nobody grills a hetero, atheist couple about this stuff. It's irrelevant.
Yeah, that's totally true. And in the US states that allow gay marriage, a gay couple can get married just like a straight couple can get married, with some legal paperwork and not necessarily a religious ceremony.
However, in the places that allow some sort of civil partnership instead of marriage, those are specifically designed to NOT be legally marriage, and the news can't call them marriage without quotes since its a legal term. The problem here is with the law, not the reporting.
Now, if they had written this article about a couple who got legally married in Massachusates, then we could complain about the writing, becuase in that case it would legally be a marriage.
there is a difference, you can't get married in your backyard in England :-)... I wish you could, it'd be much cheaper....
the 'othering' is done by the government not the BBC.
Same-sex civil partnerships are not marriage because they're not called marriage. Even if it comes with all the legal trimmings, that it's called something different means it's something different. It's the concept of separate but equal. I think the BBC is pretty ethically sound in using the quotation marks because they didn't get married, they got civilly partnered.
It's the idea that gays have to have something different that's othering, imo, not that the BBC reflects that in in their writing.
So does that make them "divorced?"
Its actually not the same legal rights as marriage in the UK. Civil partnership includes a lot of the same rights, such as immigration rights, adoption rights etc., but doesn't include the same rights on tax and inheritance... not sure of other differences. I don't think there is a need to put scare quotes around wedding and newlyweds though - it doesn't highlight the fact that gay people don't have the same rights as much as it highlights that some people don't think it's a real marriage, so I think the BBC should have written about this differently
Thanks for your comments, everyone. I realise now that the problem is more with the government's definition rather than the BBC's reporting of it.
I do, however, agree with Sam's comment - the reporting still Othered same-sex ceremonies by comparing it to heterosexual marriage. Quotation marks around marriage does send a pretty clear message, legally accurate or not.