Same-Sex Marriage: The Road to Equality

“Sometimes we overestimate the difficulties of changing the world. When The Independent was founded, in 1986, the idea that same-sex couples in Britain would one day enjoy the same rights to matrimony as heterosexual ones was barely thinkable: not because there was anything improbable about the concept itself, but because the required changes to the status quo seemed too mountainous.


Yet somehow, barely a quarter of a lifetime later, everything has changed. Immovable obstacles have been pushed aside; prejudices have been eroded; the seemingly immutable established order has changed. Love between two people of the same gender can be proclaimed and celebrated as loudly and joyously as any other love - and the idea that there was once a time when the laws on marriage did not apply to all British citizens equally is already beginning to seem quaint and implausible.


This book, which collects reports published in The Independent over more than two decades, allows you to retrace the long, hard journey to change, step by step, setback by setback, bold leap by bold leap. It is a story of courage, resilience, prejudice and principle, created by journalists who cannot have known, at the time, that what they were writing would one day form a chapter in a longer good news story.


It has been said many times that journalism is the first draft of history. This book allows to you consider history as it happened. It is, in that sense, an important document. But it is, above all, a moving narrative of human hope and decency - which is arguably all the more moving when you know that, despite all the setbacks, there is a happy ending.”