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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Letters

A sop – but a useful one

Henry Kane (right) and Christopher Flanagan laugh as confetti is thrown at them in Belfast after they become the United Kingdom’s second gay couple to formalise a civil partnership in 2005
Henry Kane (right) and Christopher Flanagan laugh as confetti is thrown at them in Belfast after they become the United Kingdom’s second gay couple to formalise a civil partnership in 2005. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Mary Kenny writes (Letters, 9 March): “Civil partnerships for homosexual couples were not just ‘a sop’: they were about inheritance law and pensions.” They were both. They were an acknowledgment that gay couples should enjoy legal protection but at the same time put out the message that gay couples would defile the institution of marriage and such protection would only be supplied via the equivalent of separate drinking fountains.
Paul Brownsey
Glasgow

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