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VANCOUVER (CP) - A British lesbian couple who married in Canada three years ago is launching a court challenge against the United Kingdom's ban on same-sex marriage, saying they want their vows to be recognized at home.
Lawyers for Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger will argue at a hearing in the U.K. High Court starting Tuesday that failure to validate the marriage amounts to a breach of their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The university professors married in Vancouver but their marriage was automatically converted to a civil partnership last December when a new law recognizing gay unions came into effect in the U.K.
It grants homosexual couples the same tax, pension and inheritance status as married heterosexual couples, but the women say that's not enough.
Wilkinson, 52, was teaching in the women's studies department at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., when she and Kitzinger married in August 2003.
"It was at that very historic time (in Canada) when marriage was opened up to same-sex couples and it was a really important step for lesbian and gay human rights and we found ourselves in the middle of that and became part of it," Wilkinson said from her home in Yorkshire, England.
Besides Canada, same-sex marriage is also legal in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.
However, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced that the House of Commons will vote this fall on a motion asking members of Parliament if they want to repeal same-sex legislation.
Wilkinson said she and Kitzinger want to be treated as any heterosexual couple who would have married in Canada before returning to England, although she acknowledges that civil partnerships are a huge step forward for gays and lesbians in the U.K.
"They do actually confer a very wide range of rights and responsibilities whereas previously there was nothing," she said.
But Kitzinger, 49, said the issue is about equality.
"We feel, I guess, insulted, humiliated, degraded as second-class citizens to have our marriage treated differently, treated as a civil partnership.
"Civil partnerships for same-sex couples and marriage reserved for different-sex couples is not an acceptable solution for lesbian and gay rights. .n.nIt imposes an apartheid system."
Charles McVety, president of the Calgary-based Canada Family Action Coalition, said he disagrees with Canada's decision to legalize same-sex marriage and now that decision is impacting other countries.
"We are not in step with the world," McVety said.
"Britain looked at redefining marriage and they declined to do so. One of the most liberal countries on Earth, France, looked at it and did proper due process and came out with an exhaustive study in January and decided not to redefine marriage," he said.
"Marriage is a religious institution and under separation of Church and state the state has no right to redefine baptism, communion, bar mitzvahs or marriage."
Gilles Marchildon, executive director of Egale Canada, said from Ottawa his group is supporting the British couple.
"They have recognition but it is not equal marriage and if one of them had been of a different gender there would be no issue about recognizing the Canadian marriage," Marchildon said.
Rabbi Roderick Young and David Mooney, who live in London, are anxiously awaiting the outcome of the High Court challenge.
Young and Mooney married in Montreal last October in a Jewish ceremony.
Young said while the United Kingdom's Civil Partnership Act provides "wonderful protection" for gay and lesbian people, the law is discriminatory because it prohibits any religious elements during marriage ceremonies between homosexuals.
"What it says is religious marriage is not open to gay and lesbian people, that we can only have what I call marriage lite, you know, like Miller Lite," Young said.
"I believe that mine and David's marriage is recognized by God and it's just time for the state to catch up."
Young said he knows several homosexual couples who have travelled to Canada to wed.
That's partly because Belgium and Holland require one of the partners to be a citizen or resident of the country, while Canada does not have any such requirement.
© The Canadian Press, 2006
