Today is a great day for marriage equality even if it related to two court cases.
First in Belfast the High Court gave the go ahead for the judicial review into the ban on same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland going ahead. It is the first step of a long process. Seeing as some of the politicians on the hill and in a few of our council chambers are refusing to budge on this issue yet again the LGBT+ community of Northern Ireland have had to lean on the will of the courts once again.
Meanwhile in Washington the US Supreme Court has ruled that equal marriage is a constitutional right that should extend to all fifty states.
This latest verdict takes away one of the lynchpins of DUP opposition. There was always the argument that the largest nation in the free world did not have equal marriage across the whole nation so the UK did not have to do likewise. Well that has now changed and with the exception of Germany who like Northern Ireland have the largest party a union of fundamentalist Christians the rest of the Western World is now moving towards marriage equality.
Peter Lynas will no doubt to continue to argue that we should call Northern Ireland a backwater on the issue of marriage equality. But when your list of nations to compare us to now is largely Eastern Europe, Africa (where some want to lock up or kill all the LGBT community) and China. It is hardly the company that civilised society should aim to be keeping.
LGBT Lib Dems Northern Ireland 