Back in September, LGBT activist Peter Tatchell launched his ‘Equal Love’ campaign, which called for marriages and civil partnerships to be available to all British couples, regardless of their sexual orientation, contrary to current UK law.

Over the past couple of months, four gay couples applying for marriage licences, and four straight couples applying for civil partnership licences, have all had their applications rejected by various councils across the UK. Under the Civil Partnerships Act 2004, only same-sex couples may enter into a civil partnership. Similarly, section 11 of the Matrimonial Clauses Act provides that a valid marriage can only be entered into by a male and a female. Meanwhile, Professor Robert Wintermute of King's College, London, has formulated a legal challenge to the rulings, on the basis that refusing civil partnerships to straight couples, and marriage to gay ones, contravenes articles 8, 12 and 14 of the Human Rights Act. Later this month, the campaign will launch its challenge to the courts.

‘A lot of fuss over nothing’, say traditional conservative grumblers. ‘We’ve given them civil partnerships – why are they still trying to clamber into our marital bed?’ It is easy to suggest that the gay community is quibbling over terminology, but the term civil partnership has never smelled quite as sweet as the floral ‘M word’. If civil partnerships were equal to marriages, then why not call them that in the first place?

And there’s another more sinister reason for labelling all as married, which involves looking outside of the complacent sanctuary of British human rights for a moment. What good travelling to Uganda, where ‘how to identify a homosexual’ pamphlets encourage gay hangings, or Iran where homosexuality is punishable by death, if your UK passport states the fact that you are civil partnered?

While a Populus opinion poll conducted in June 2009 found that 61% of the public are in favour of gay marriage, rather than mere civil partnership, the debate is more complex than a mere clash of conservative and liberal values. Boris Johnson has always supported the campaign yet gay rights campaign group Stonewall initially did not. In a statement that managed to attract criticism from several quarters, Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill suggested that gay marriage could cost the country millions of pounds, as same-sex friends queued up to profess faux love and reap the tax benefits. While nothing may be safe from the coalition’s seemingly indiscriminate budget cuts (legal aid is a case in point), a sentient, democratic system should not put a price on equality. That a man meant to be defending human rights over costs savings failed to identify this, seems even more bizarre.

Besides the obvious romantic declaration, civil partnerships were constructed as a means of affording gay couples the same tax and inheritance rights as straight couples, while pacifying multi-faith religious opponents to gay marriage, who do not believe homosexual union can be consecrated in the eyes of God. But the Civil Partnership Act 2004 has always been a barbed bouquet offered to the gay community, mainly because of the two-tier system of union it has perpetuated. If civil partnership was designed to bring all the legal bounty and protection traditional marriage does, why, critics argue, couldn’t the rights of civil marriage merely be extended to same-sex couples, thus satisfying both gay romantics and faithful traditionalists?

Well, because sometimes the gay are the faithful too. While current civil marriage forbids the use of religious symbols, music or text, the new Equality Act now allows civil partnerships to be held on religious premises, and the first civil partnership in Westminster chapel took place in March between MP Chris Bryant and his partner Jared Cranney. But for many that does not go far enough.

C of E Minister Reverend Sharon Ferguson and her partner, Franka Strietzel, one of the eight Equal Love campaign couples, were refused a marriage licence by Greenwich Council in November. Explaining that the application was more than just a publicity stunt, Ferguson said ‘Because of my Christian faith, it is marriage [not a civil partnership] that I want. As Christians, we believe in the sanctity of marriage, and it is a God-given institution, and therefore it is the only institution we want to be part of.’

In a land where church and state are supposedly separate, it makes little sense for marriage to be legally defined in relation to the church. But by the same token, it is for the church to decide whether religious marriage should be available to its gay congregation. In the Christian church, Anglicans and Quakers obviously take a different stance to Catholics. The problem then becomes akin to that of Catholic adoption agencies refusing to act on the behalf of gay adopters. Do civil liberties override doctrine and tradition? If you make civil marriage available to all, you certainly put paid to religion commandeering marriage as its own institution. Anything else is then left to the clergy and their congregants.

Of course, there are some cost and practical considerations. Presuming there was a change in the law, if all civil partnerships were to be legally recorded as marriages, what would happen to all the old civil partnerships? Would they be renamed marriages? What if the couples that had previously opted for civil partnership did so because it was distinct from marriage (a position more prevalent within the gay community than you might expect)? But these are mere finger-splinters, rather than thorns in the side, and hardly worth compromising national sexual equality for.

Crucially, representing the Equal Love campaign as a gay rights call to arms misses the point, says Tatchell – hence the participation of straight couples who wish to circumvent what they see as the always homophobic, often sexist institution of marriage in their protest. Now that all four of the straight couples applying for civil partnerships have also had their applications refused, the message is clear: welcome to Big Society Britain, where all hearts are lost to amorous apartheid.