Skyrocketing lesbian ‘divorce’ rates show failure of same-sex couples imitating marriage
by Joseph Shaw, LifeSite:
It seems that women in the U.K. who consider themselves “married” to other women are separating in soaring numbers — at rates higher than actual divorces, which is to say among heterosexual couples, who alone can marry. One lesbian activist, Natalie Drew, blames this uptick in lesbian “divorces” on same-sex “marriage” itself.
The Daily Mail reports that “divorces” among same-sex couples increased from 428 in 2018 to 822 in 2019, and of the 2019 figure, almost three quarters are lesbian couples. (There were also 107,599 actual divorces that year in the U.K., an increase of 20% on the previous year.) Drew ran a clinic to help women in lesbian couples conceive children, and, as she told the Daily Mail, “a third of the 586 lesbian couples [sic] she helped to have babies between 2011 and 2015 have split up.”
Drew’s argument is that the ceremony and terminology of marriage, as opposed to “civil partnership,” encourages lesbian couples to adopt a traditional specialization of roles: “You get caught up in these expected roles, one being the breadwinner, going out earning the money, and one being the mother.”
This may seem surprising, as the legal rights and duties of marriage and civil partnerships in the U.K. are identical, but it’s an argument we’ve heard before. The heterosexual couple who fought in the courts for civil partnerships to be extended beyond same-sex couples (as in due course they were) said they wanted a legal relationship free of the “patriarchal baggage” of marriage.
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