Cullen Michael: Civil Union Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Cullen Michael: Civil Union Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:622;Page:17506] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 Thank you Madam Chairperson for the opportunity to take a brief call. I want to cover just two issues really. 
The first issue is what I think lies at the heart of this bill the companion legislation and the homosexual law reform legislation of the mid-1980s. What that is quite simply is allowing people to be who they are to be comfortable with who they are and to live a normal life as who they are. In my life I have known too many people—and I know one or two still—who are gay but for some peculiar reason seem unable to express that publicly are unable to live their lives honestly within a public arena and are intensely miserable and unhappy people. It is quite obvious from simply watching them that they are intensely miserable and unhappy people. I am not sure why we should think that is a good thing or why we should decide to make people in effect through the way we act—through law and through norms—live a life such that they cannot be themselves and cannot be who and what they actually are. 
That is particularly the case when what they are and who they are does not actually affect the rest of us. The fact that somebody is gay that somebody has a relationship with a person of the same sex does not affect me at all. It does not affect my relationship with my wife and it does not affect the nature in my view of the society around me. I just want to engage in that peculiar argument which I think we have heard hinted at once or twice that gay people should somehow force themselves to be heterosexual live in extraordinarily unhappy relationships and rear children within those extraordinarily unhappy relationships. I cannot understand why anybody would think it is a good idea to try to force people to live in unhappy relationships and to raise children within them. 
I turn to the issue of marriage. I have heard quite a bit of the debate and there is still enormous confusion—as I think is quite common in New Zealand—between secular law and ecclesiastical law. Nothing in this bill affects the position of a Church any Churches in relation to their view of what is ecclesiastical law and the nature of marriage within the Church itself. It is worth reminding ourselves that in terms of our English law tradition there was no secular law of marriage until 1754. Marriage was a purely ecclesiastical affair up to that point and it was regulated in part one suspects to try to force people to marry within the Church of England because after 1754 one could marry outside the Church of England only if one was a Quaker. Nobody else could get married unless he or she got married within the Church of England and that state remained until 1836 when Protestant dissenters achieved the passage of the Civil Marriages Act and it became possible to marry outside the Church of England. That probably really created modern secular marriage as an institution. 
What the Civil Union Bill does not do is extend secular marriage to gay people; it provides for civil union for recognition of relationships. People argue that that is perhaps playing with words. In my view that is not the essential point. The essential point is the State chooses to recognise or regulate relationships for the purposes of the interest of the State as a whole and that may be quite different. It is as if we were trying to impose upon the Catholic Church the abolition of clerical celibacy. I find clerical celibacy a very strange idea. I find it an even stranger idea that celibate men who wear long dresses tell us about sexuality. I find that a very odd idea indeed but that is the nature of that Church. It is a tradition that it has held—not for 2000 years because clerical celibacy arose much later in the history of the Roman Catholic Church than that—for at least something over 1000 years. Since then that has been the norm of practice within the Church and I deeply respect it. The Church stands by that position and its priests are married to the Church if one likes. 
That is not something the State should interfere with at all in my view but in the same way the Church should not interfere with the State’s definition of what relationships are and which relationships should be recognised. To me the fact that my friend Tim Barnett is able to have recognition through the State’s mechanism of the nature of himself and his relationship does not affect the Church’s position at all. The Church may continue to preach that hellfire and damnation will follow from that but that is its choice. I do not believe in hellfire and damnation at all because I do not believe in the afterlife or indeed all that goes with that so I do not think that anyone is at risk of that.