Pink Weddings Spring 2016 Pink Weddings Spring 2016

Ten years on Let’s celebrate! L Ten years on from their historic civil partnership ceremonies, those ﬁrst couples to tie the knot are not only celebrating their anniversaries, but looking at how far we’ve come… ast December was an important milestone for same-sex couples in the UK, as we celebrated ten years since the introduction of the Civil Partnerships Act. For those who entered into a partnership as soon as it became legally recognised, the anniversary holds special resonance; who could forget how far we’ve come in campaigning for the same rights as any other married couple? We embraced this opportunity by calling the civil partnership ‘marriage’, and we carried on the good fight towards true equality, until eight years later we could celebrate the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, giving us two different options to have our unions recognised in the eyes of the law. By the end of 2006, more than 16,000 same-sex couples had entered a civil partnership, with many couples choosing to convert their civil partnerships to marriages after the subsequent law change. ‘It’s amazing for us to look back now and realise that we were part of history... We’d camp aigned so hard for a level playing field, then there we were in the middle of something so intensely GIno MerIano personal.’ 8 » pink weddings magazine

Pink Weddings Spring 2016 Pink Weddings Spring 2016 | Page 8