ANNOUNCING YOUR engagement in the Births, Marriages and Deaths column of The Times is about as close as you can get to a definition of respectability. When one partner is the son of a lieutenant-colonel from Stockbridge in Hampshire, for instance, and another is a doctor, and when the ceremony is to take place — after a decent interval — in the Guildhall, Lyme Regis, you can be certain that the unions thus advertised have won the approval of society.

The names, which appeared under the discreet heading “civil partnerships”, belonged to couples of the same sex seemed unremarkable. And that, of course, was the point. The first success of the Civil Partnership Act, which has now come into force, has been the absence of fuss. The legislation has won cross-party support. There has been no obvious dissent from the public. Even the more militant religious groups have accepted that, since the partnerships will fall short of marriage, and are there for practical reasons, such as inheriting a will, avoiding inheritance tax or benefiting from national insurance contributions, there is no call for outright opposition.

A giant step, then, for homosexual rights, achieving as much in eight lines of condensed typeface as any number of gay pride marches, Section 28 protests or Peter Tatchell-style outings. Far more in fact, because it puts the flamboyant, assertive, camp, outrageous and sometimes plain offensive gay stereotype firmly in its place, proclaiming, instead, a more modest slogan: proud to be ordinary. Or, as the journalist Andrew Sullivan, put it ten years ago, in his book of the same title: virtually normal.

That “virtually” still hangs uncertainly in the air, however. Just how much was emphasised by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, retired President of the High Court Family Division. In her lecture to the Bar Council this week, she said that the Government had introduced measures whose effect was to undermine marriage — and there was no doubt which kind of marriage she meant. Married couples were no longer being given tax incentives to stay together, and heterosexuals in common-law relationships had been omitted from the provisions of the Civil Partnership Act. The implication was clear: gay relationships were favoured, while “real” marriage was being downgraded.

The same argument was put, in more sophisticated terms, by Ferdinand Mount, who asked, in The Daily Telegraph last weekend, why the Government seemed prepared to promote homosexual marriage “when this most uxorious of prime ministers will not lift a finger to promote the hetero variety?” After all, he added: “All the research shows that being married, with all its ups and downs, is by far the most effective way of making young men law-abiding and giving them a sense of purpose and self-worth.”

If that is true of heterosexual marriage, it must surely be the case too for homosexual couples. If both relationships are to be regarded as normal, why should one continue to be in the premier division of respectability, while the other languishes somewhere in the second. However elegantly the argument may be put, it remains the saloon-bar definition of the difference between “gays” and “straights”: they’re different, mate, know what I mean? And so long as that remains society’s official attitude, then homophobia, every bit as pervasive in this country as racism, will remain endemic. Why, after all, should an improvement in the status of one section of society be seen as diminishing the rights of another?

When Sullivan, who lives in America, wrote his plea for the acceptance of homosexuality back in 1995, it was still demonised by the evangelical Right, who regarded it as a moral perversion and a sin against God. The key to reversing this deep-seated prejudice, argued Sullivan, was to recognise the legitimacy of homosexuality, and there was no better way of signalling it than by accepting marriage between gay couples. Denying that possibility was, he said, “the most public affront possible to their public equality”, whereas giving them the legal right to cohabit “could bring the essence of gay life into the heart of the traditional family in a way the family can most understand”. It was an argument that he conducted not only with the political Right but with the more radical branches of the gay movement, which saw no advantage at all in being clasped to the bosom of an Establishment with which they felt they were at war.

Ten years later, attitudes have softened on both sides of the Atlantic. Even the Roman Catholic Church has begun taking steps towards the acceptance of homosexuality by indicating that gay men can join the priesthood, provided they are “capable of affective maturity, have a capacity for celibacy and [do] not share the values of the eroticised gay culture”. This may seem grudging, but for the Vatican it is a step at least as giant as the Civil Partnership Act.

These, then, are important advances, not just for homosexual rights, but for civilised values in general. But so long as gay partnerships are seen as undermining the institution of marriage, rather than being part of it, prejudice will remain. Announcing your impending union in the personal columns of The Times is an important milestone along the road to normality. But it is still only a virtual one. Reality will take a little longer. If I were a gay campaigner I might observe, as Tony Blair did last week when asked whether Peter Mandelson had won our confidence: “A lot done, a lot still to do.”

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