Fighting the Irish System

My friend Karl writes from Dublin about two brave women attempting the impossible–getting the Irish government to recognize gay marriage. He writes:

There’s a legal case that just started in the courts in Ireland today. A lesbian couple that have been living together for 23 years, and were married in Vancouver in September last year, are fighting for legal recognition of their marriage. They tried to get treated as a married couple for tax purposes, but the Revenue Commissioners refused (apparently they interpreted married couple in the tax legislation by looking up ‘marriage’ in the Oxford English Dictionary!).

There’s a brief article about it here. Typically, though, the BBC has a better story. Interestingly, one of the two women is on Ireland’s government-appointed Human Rights Commission.

UPDATE: They’ll be talking about this down the pub. This couple has won the right to a full hearing, which is likely to take place next year.

2 comments

  1. Even the OED has moved on:

    1. a. The condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony. The term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex.

    Perhaps they had an old edition.

    What appalls me is the supposedly libertarian citizens of New Hampshire, Alaska and Montana. Do they need a dictionary to tell them what libertarianism is? Trudeau said it best.

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