By Hilary White
LONDON, December 1, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The leader of Britain's Conservative party said yesterday that under a Tory government, same-sex partners in registered domestic partnerships would be afforded the same tax benefits as married couples.
David Cameron let it slip in comments to the Daily Mail that the Tories will consider any relationship registered with the state as qualifying for tax benefits. A Conservative Party spokesman later told the homosexualist news service PinkNews, "David Cameron has always made it clear that civil partnerships should be treated the same as marriage."
In the Daily Mail, Cameron had accused the Labour government of being "pathologically" opposed to marriage and said that Tory tax reform would encourage marriage in the same way as the rest of the EU. Cameron's attack came in response to comments by Children's Secretary Ed Balls, who had said the Labour government did not believe marriage is the key to a happy family.
Cameron said, "Labour's pathological inability to recognise that marriage is a good thing puts them on completely the wrong side of their own dividing line. Ed Balls seems to see marriage as irrelevant. I don't think it is.
"I think marriage is a good institution. I don't need an opinion poll to tell me whether it is or isn't. That's just what I think."
Ed Balls, who was himself recently married, said yesterday that Labour proposals to be published next year will assert that children's welfare is not necessarily best protected through marriage, but instead through "stable and lasting relationships between parents."
Cameron is laying out the Tory plans for the next election which polls indicate he is neatly set to win, though perhaps not with a majority.
Cameron's popularity recently took a serious hit with his reneging on a "cast iron" promise to hold a referendum on Britain's ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Now that the Treaty has been passed, he argued, it is no longer meaningful to hold a referendum on ratification; instead the goal would be to "repatriate" some powers from Brussels back to Westminster.
Despite positioning himself as a champion of the traditional family and old fashioned British values, Cameron has repeatedly backed away from meaningfully conservative policies. Cameron told a meeting of Conservatives that he supported unlimited abortion for disabled children, even though his own son, Ivan, was born with severe disabilities.
In May this year, the Conservative party indicated that support for the homosexualist political agenda would be among the top five priorities for the party.