Agenda gave time to an Aro Valley flat exchange with the Labour candidate. The You Tube footage has been pushed by Labour blogs for weeks.

The Labour candidate has been feigning hurt from claims by a gay newspaper, drawn from their coverage on the arguments over the Civil Union Bill. It has been part of an attempt to spread an ‘anti-gay’ smear.

For the record, I favoured the decriminalisation of homosexual conduct in Fran Wilde’s Bill. I drafted speech notes used by Ruth Richardson in her support of that Bill.

Though I ultimately voted against the Civil Union Bill it was not because I objected to gay couples being able to opt in to a status of committed partners recognised as such by the law. My reasons for the votes are set out at length in Hansard. A primary reason was because the companion bill which gave effect to civil union status unnecessarily treated de facto couples as if they had chosen marriage or civil union.

Civil union rightly requires on an "I do" to change the partners’ rights and obligations. But the new law extended the same consequences to people who had never consented. Indeed some may have been actively saying "I don’t " in staying de facto.

I sat on the Select Committee hearing submissions and sometimes chaired it (in my capacity as deputy chair of the Committee). Despite hearing literally hundreds of submissions, often repetitive, I tried to give submitters an idea of the likely response to their submissions.

“If people love each other why should they not be free to marry” was an argument heard scores of times.  The same submitters often expressed the view that long term committed relationships were in the interests of the whole community, and the state should foster them.

The trouble with both arguments for how the Bill should read was that it did not mention love or long term commitment anywhere.  While I shared the sentiment in favour of both, nothing in the Bill required either, or used them as a test. I thought that if those factors were to rule, they needed to be teased out into words or principles. 

I preferred the NZ Law Commission’s draft legislation, which followed Danish and other North European precedents. They focussed on the expression of a wish to opt in to a legal partnership relationship and therefore did not leave room for debate about what exactly the term "civil union" was to encompass.

To me people who care enough to submit deserve more than leaving without any feeling for how they’ve been received. I appreciate it when people are straight with me, and I try to be plain speaking in return. People know what I think and they usually thank me for  that even if they do not agree with me. I got on well with Tim Barnett, who usually chaired the committee because I trusted him and I believe he trusted me to be honest.

 So I tried to give submitters an idea of the issues that could mean their submissions would not change the Bill. Most members just let them finish and leave without comment. 

 In relation to the argument that love should be enough to marry I sometimes asked them how the law should deal with sisters living together, or elderly mother and daughter, or uncle and nephew. All of those loving relationships could be simplified in legal terms (inheritance, asset disposal on break-up) if they were able to opt in to a status that had similar legal effect to marriage (i.e. civil union).  Some days I asked whether love should be enough if it was 3 or more long-time friends. In other words on what principle should polygamy be forbidden  if love or commitment should be sufficient conditions (let alone how they would be expressed as conditions)?

One day instead of using as my example query the elderly sisters, or other relationships forbidden to marry I responded to a particularly strong assertion that the State had no business trying to judge the type of relationship as long as there was love (a view with which I had some sympathy) I mentioned that I loved my dog, but that was not enough.

Citing that comment out of context became  a gift to militants who saw alignments on civil union as a "friend from foe" identifier. Maybe they were for many people. I treated the Bill in the same way as I tried to treat all Bills before my Select Committee – that is by reading the words for what they actually said and the legal consequences, not for their slogan power.

Similarly used have been quotations from Hansard of a speech in which I described submissions that had nothing to do with the Bill. For example many gay couples made eloquent pleas for the Bill so that they could not be barred from visiting their partners in hospital. I agreed that they should not be prevented. Trouble was – any such problem never had anything to do with law changed by the Bill. 

Many submissions on both sides were exchanges in what are now called “culture wars”. I said I was tired of submissions from “grumpy Christians and whining gays”.

Sadly in a PC world  PC opponents gain weapons from such plain speaking.

My Labour opponent makes a feature of being a gay activist. He mentions it at every opportunity. Since my candidacy was first mooted his supporters have tried to paint me as homophobic, presumably on the theory that it will mobilize Wellingtonians to his cause. 

Initially I accepted the possibility that he was genuinely upset by what he’d been told. He is passionate. For example he thinks the AIDS Foundation position on taking blood donations from gay men is not militant enough.

But now I know he is well aware of the context to those statements. He no doubt feels it is working for him.