Referendum on Gender Equality (THREADBANS IN OP)

You don’t even seem to know what the constitution says with your nonsense about “a woman’s place being in the home” earlier in the thread, so excuse me of i don’t take you seriously.

Well, essentially, a two-stage process is what I am proposing. First, delete the offensive article, and I think that that will pass by a huge majority and secondly, vote on a replacement. I am worried that people in not wanting the second, will vote against the first.

A constitution without those articles and replaced with nothing is better than a constitution with them.

But it's not removing any rights.

It's giving extra rights to fathers, and yo families that are not based in marriage.

Extra rights do not take away existing rights

They do not have the special rights and protections that women, mothers and married families are given by the constitution.

Do you not believe they should have the same protections?

man who had been in a 20 year relationship with his children mother, never married. Not entitled to survivors pension.

If they were married, he would be entitled to the payment

Not to get off topic and for the record I agree with the referendum being put to us but, I often here us lauded for our citizens assembly but here is my issue with it. On the face of it, it sounds excellent. A randomly selected 99 person panel who discuss topics and make recommendation to cabinet on the direction of policy and referenda, fine.

If you dig deeper though what is it really? The topics of discussion are not decided by the assembly members they are picked by the government and assembly is established based on that. The chairperson is a political appointee not someone elected from the panel. Added to that that whilst the initial panel is random it then goes down to a "jury selection" model to decide the 99 actual members.

So to say that the government have no say in what comes out of the assembly is naïve to say the least. The topics are decided by the government and the chairperson who steers the discussion is an appointee by the government. I don't call that fully independent.

The act cannot be updated until the constitution is changed.

Legislation cannot be made that is unconstitutional. If family is defined as being based on a married couple, then legislation cannot say otherwise.

You could argue the payment of child benefit. If a child lives with a mother it must be paid to them. In fact step mothers have precedent over biological fathers also.

If you read the thread you will see a recent case I linked. An unmarried fathers unable to collect assistance for his children after his partner had died.

He is not automatically in this country his children's father, there are recent developments that allow him , given certain circumstances to be recognised as their father. The fact he and his partner were unmarried, means he is not entitled to assistance, that he would have been if they had been married.

You are overlooking the context of the time.

Everyone was getting substantial tax cuts - they just decided to give greater tax cuts to double income families.

Women (and, let's face it it was almost always women) returning to the workforce got NO tax free allowances etc. so they paid tax on every penny they earned - usually at the top rate. Not only was that unfair, it meant that even when they went from a 1 to a 2 income family their spouse maintained a great deal of control over the family finances, and this control was abused by quite a few.

Also a two income family will have far greater costs - likely two cars, two people buying work clothes, but most of all childcare. It was only fair that two income families got some recognition of this.

No government has proposed to reverse this change in 20+ years, that should tell you something.

The 'economic necessity' blather in the constitution is just that - blather. It was meaningless in the hungry 1930s and it's meaningless today. Nobody has ever gained one penny out of it (not that the constitution should have a role in our budgetary process - let's not go there with a 'right' to housing...)

As I said, we were voluntarily a single-income family for over ten years but recognised that there are costs to that (just as there are costs of both parents working e.g. childcare and stress) I've nothing against SAHP at all but the old system was archaic and penalised those returning to work.

Giving governments an out?? It's our money they're spending (and tax cuts are really just another form of spending). A few people are unhappy with tax individualisation but a lot more would be unhappy if it was reversed.

The only reason it went to a vote on same sex marriage was because it required a constitutional amendment. So not that interesting. We elect politicians to legislate. We had an election in 2020 and oddly enough, the gender recognition act was not something people wished to vote anyone out over.

But you're happy to have no recognition for fathers. Why?

They are a Family with their previous respective spouses who they were married to, but they aren’t a Family to each other in any new relationship, and under the proposed changes, children will still not have the same protection in law in the new relationship as they have in a relationship which was defined by marriage.

The new relationship is not equal to their existing relationship based upon marriage, even after divorce. The children of parents who were married, when their parents become lone parents, still have the protections of the Family afforded to them, whereas it will be at the discretion of the Courts to determine if the new relationship constitutes the equivalent of the Family if the parents involved are not married to each other.

An undemocratic handpicked gathering of nodding state cronies? Sounds like all the more reason to vote No to me.