Playwright and author Alan Bennett has called the recent political furore caused by gay marriage “…a storm in a teacup”.
In a recent Radio Times interview Bennett, who is in a civil partnership with magazine editor Rupert Thomas, said:
“I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about over gay marriage. I haven’t met anyone who cared one way or the other.”
The author of The History Boys and the Talking Heads series of monologues continued:
“Civil partnership mattered but I really couldn’t understand why the far right-wing Conservatives were making so much fuss [about gay marriage]. It doesn’t threaten marriage. The whole thing seemed to me a storm in a teacup.”
When it was suggested in his interview that supporters of gay marriage felt it would offer total equality, Bennett replied:
“I felt that I had total equality, anyway.”
The Leeds-born Oxford graduate wrote openly about his own homosexuality for the first time in his 2005 memoirs Untold Stories.
On his own civil partnership Bennett said:
“…it wasn’t a landmark because sometimes we can’t even remember the date of it. At Camden Register Office at that time they were trying to jazz things up a bit. They said, ‘Do you want flowers?’ and we said not really. ‘Do you want music?’ Not really. Disappointment on every score.”
Photo by National Media Museumn via Flickr under a Creative Commons licence
I’m with Alan Bennett on this one, I don’t see why gay marriage – or any marriage – is so important, you can get all the same rights from civil partnership already. In fact for both parties really understanding what the contract actually means I think civil partnership is better.
I will admit to being biased though, I think marriage is irrelevant now – other than as a tool for extracting money from the spouse on divorce. People get married and divorced at the drop of a hat.