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Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle are making a stand, they say, against “an apartheid of sorts”.
They are refusing to get married, on the grounds that marriage is an institution that excludes homosexuals — and to get married would be “to condone that”, with who knows what consequences.
So they have instead put in for a civil partnership at Islington Town Hall - cunningly applying, so as not to tip the authorities off to their scheme, under surnames and first initials only.
The date has now been set for 24 November. Somehow, though, their story has come out.
Now — a time for finalising flower arrangements, pinning dresses and swearing at caterers — they are facing the ruination of what should be the happiest day of their 25-year-old lives.
Islington council has announced that the ceremony won't be allowed to proceed.
“Our hands are tied.” The 2004 Civil Partnership Act, you see, only makes provision for partners of the same sex to be legally joined.
Civil partnership, as it turns out, is an estate ordained of Tony Blair for the lifelong partnership of man and man, or woman and woman, and it is an abomination before Blair to see man and woman unnaturally so conjoined. As Peter Tatchell points out, this is “heterophobic”, kinda.
Veterans of Robben Island, Sharpeville and Soweto might think the comparison with apartheid is — how to put this? — a little too loose to be really useful, though.
The ANC weren't campaigning for the right of South Africa's black majority to call themselves white. They were campaigning for equality under the law. And that's what we've already got.
“Effectively marriage and civil partnerships are exactly the same — it's a duplicate law,” Mr Freeman himself says.
“The effects and legal processes are identical. The rights and obligations are identical. Civil partnerships are equality in all but name — so why not just have equality?”
Well, yes. But the energy Freeman and Doyle are putting into righting what is — literally — a nominal wrong puts one in mind of the Modern Parents, Viz magazine's unkind parody of earnest, bearded north London liberals.
Things are pretty much okee-dokee in a society, I think, where the nomenclature is the only thing wrong with a law.
In trying to highlight the institutional bigotry of the marriage ceremony, Freeman and Doyle have succeeded in exposing the symmetrical bigotry of the civil partnership ceremony.
Something of an own goal, you might think. Or perhaps you take the view that it's simply proof that gay marriage is the equal of its traditional counterpart.
Either way, how about we call an amiable no-score draw before the whole dog-and-pony show ends up clattering off to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg?
Hardly a Belle of the ball
Belle de Jour, who blogged anonymously about life as a prostitute, has broken cover. She is research scientist Brooke Magnanti, 34. It's hard to think who will be feeling more bitter at the news. The gobby ex-boyfriend who stood to make money from shopping her to the papers?
Toby Young, who will be gutted that this puts an end to the rumour that it was him? Or all those moralists — among them the Archbishop of York — who thought Belle was a hoax, and an irresponsible one at that?
Not only is Belle real, she's intelligent, successful, unembittered and female.
Plus, she started hooking because of her principles: she scrupled at borrowing money from friends.
The only line now available to us moralists is that Dr Magnanti's confession Sends Out The Wrong Message.
By turning out to exist, she has acted extremely irresponsibly — and I think it's time she had a good hard think about what she's done.
A face to acquaint yourselves with
I was at the South Bank on Tuesday, doing a talk with the Spanish writer Javier Marias about Poison, Shadow and Farewell — the concluding volume of his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy.Marias is routinely described as Spain's best writer, and a shoo-in for the Nobel.
He's as interesting on stage as anyone I've chaired. And yet — which tells us a bit about the market here for foreign bosh — his audience only half-filled the Purcell Room.
I'm not sure comparisons to Proust, though well-meant, entirely did him a favour.
Your Face Tomorrow — in a translation by Margaret Jull Costa so brilliant that Marias hints it reads better than the Spanish version — is wonderfully rangy and funny and absorbing, somewhere between a thriller and a novel of ideas. He ought to be filling the QEH.
• Drawn out by an interview for the Standard, Sting described the X Factor as “televised karaoke where they conform to stereotypes ... and are not encouraged to create any real unique signature or fingerprint.”
How could they, when the judges — whom he rudely described as having “no recognisable talent but self-promotion” — are all “advising them what to wear and how to look”? This unexceptionable statement of the truth has stung X Factor's Simon Cowell.
But given a lemon, he seeks to make lemonade. He has challenged Sting to come on the show and, er, advise the contestants. Is it possible that Cowell has missed the point?
Reader views (2)
Escorts are very good actresses. You would not know they were being forced against their will(as the govt claims), they joke and laugh and are quite normal. They also set the rules and its on their terms. They tend to be English women in their mid twenties or thirties. Despite what the press claim!!
- Jane, London, 16/11/2009 16:42
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Anyone who has known an escort, rather than just read the endless propaganda spouted by the govt, Harriet Harperson, Ms Bindel, Poppy Project and the Archbisp of York about 'explotation, trafficking, same as rape etc etc' will be profoundly unsurprised to find that Belle de Jour is normal, attractive, intelligent and unembittered.
- David, London, 16/11/2009 10:15
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