Madam, - Your Editorial of November 5th, "Same-sex unions", correctly argues that confining the recognition of same-sex unions to civil partnership would be to "entrench inequality".
As the Government-appointed Working Group on Domestic Partnership has stressed, only the introduction of civil marriage for same-sex couples will achieve full equality of status with opposite-sex couples.
In the course of the Dáil debate on this issue last week, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform set out the Attorney General's view that introducing same-sex civil marriage through legislation could be incompatible with Article 41.3.1 of the Constitution. In this the State "pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of marriage, on which the family is founded, and to protect it against attack".
If the Attorney General is correct, this is nothing more or less than an argument for reforming the definition of the family in the Constitution, in order to put an end to this form of discrimination against same-sex couples. - Yours, etc,
MARK KELLY, Director, Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7.