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Happy Anniversary, Civil Partnership

Adam Macy (Andrew Wincott) and Ian Craig (Stephen Kennedy) getting hitched.
Minister for Equality, Meg Munn calls it one of the most significant pieces of legislation introduced by the Blair government. The Civil Partnership Act was one yesterday, although the first ceremonies only took place on 19th (Nothern Ireland), 20th (Scotland) and 21st (England) December 2005.

Since then just over 15,000 partnerships have taken place, a figure that overtakes the government's expectations by several years. There were 14,084 partnerships in England, 537 in Wales, 942 in Scotland and 109 in Northern Ireland.

Read the full report from the Office for National Statistics here.

The interesting thing about this, apart from the obvious demand for and success of the law, is that society hasn't collapsed, as all good religious wingnuts would want people to believe.

However, as I mentioned before, while we have more or less won the legal, there is still a lot of work to be done to make people and society realise that we are not that different from them and therefore should receive fair and equal treatment.

A survey for the BBC World Service looking at the views of young people aged 15-17 in key cities (in total 3,050 people were interviewed around the world in ten key cities including London, New York, Rio, Delhi, Moscow, Cairo, Baghdad,, Lagos, Nairobi and Jakarta) shows that 47% of them are against homosexuals being given the same rights as heterosexuals while 37% backed equal rights. In London, only 36% of 313 young people asked backed same sex rights, 39% were against it (see).

On a lighter note and as I was saying a month ago, the Archers will be holding theirs and probably also "Soapland"'s first Civil Partnership on Thursday 14 December (7.00pm (repeated the next day at 2.00pm), BBC Radio4).

"Soap’s longest running gay romance, involving Adam Macy (Andrew Wincott) and Ian Craig (Stephen Kennedy) - pictured -, began in April 2004 with a kiss in a polytunnel that left listeners in no doubt about how the farmer and chef felt about one another. Of course, ragged nerves and family politics are customary at any wedding – and the union of Adam and Ian is no exception."



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Comments

  1. It's odd seeing the real-life pictures of cast members from the Archers. It never matches up to the picture I have in my head. The exception to this is Ian. He does match, somehow.

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