The fight for the right to love


Simon Jarrett considers marriage, another frontier for people with learning disabilities to conquer in their fight to live the same lives as the rest of us. Getting married can be a legal minefield  or, as the ‘unicorn wedding’ of Polly Gibson and Joe Minogue showed, it can also be spectacularly joyful.

The right to marry – to publicly express our love for a partner, and, at a less romantic level, to acquire the legal rights that accompany the formal marriage process – is something we take for granted. Great strides have been made in recent years in the arena of single sex partnerships, although of course there is still a way to go.

However, for people with learning disabilities, the right to marry is still not a given.

Belinda Schwehr reports elsewhere in this issue (page 10-11) on just how complex issues of consent can be, not only before but even after marriage.

In 2014 The Guardian reported on the case of Sarah Thompson Drayton who, with her family, had to fight a year-long battle to marry her partner Daniel Drayton as local adult care services tried to stop them from marrying. Both Sarah and Daniel were classified as having severe learning disabilities. Local services in Poole, Dorset threatened that Daniel could face criminal charges if he went ahead, and also suggested that their vicar could find himself in legal trouble if he performed the ceremony.

The wedding eventually went ahead, with great success, after intervention by Mencap and the citing of a legal precedent from Sheffield of a couple with learning disabilities who married in 2004. The local authority, in typical sterile jargon, stated: “We consider every case on an individual basis. We work closely with clients, their families and professionals to ensure that any recommendations are fully informed, and consider the feelings of those involved.”

A right to fall in love

Who would have thought they were talking about a wedding? As Sarah’s mother commented in more recognisably human terms: “My daughter had a right to fall in love like anyone else.”

What a contrast all of this is with the joyful wedding of Polly Gibson and Joe Minogue, both of whom have Down’s syndrome, in 2016. Their spectacular wedding in Surrey featured a Unicorn throne – thus earning it the title ‘The Unicorn Wedding’ – and was a riot of colour and joyous support from families and friends.

Photographs from the wedding went viral, after first being featured on the wedding blog Rock n Roll Bride. Polly and Joe were featured on the BBC, The Sun, The Daily Mirror, Good Housekeeping, Italian Vogue, and in online publications across the world, including America, Japan, Australia and France. Millions shared in the joy of the occasion.

Wedding photographer Leela Bennett told Community Living that she was asked to cover this wedding because she had been the photographer at Polly’s sister’s wedding, where Polly had been a bridesmaid. The family had been impressed at the way she had responded to Polly in the same way as she had responded to all the other bridesmaids, rather than either singling her out or ignoring her. And it is perhaps this approach, the way in which she treated the wedding as a joyous union of two people rather than an unusual disability event, that gave her pictures such power and elicited such an extraordinary response.

Somewhere between the dead hand of local authorities using the Mental Capacity Act to try to prevent the marriage of two people who love each other, and joyous ‘unicorn weddings’ that go viral because they are such a surprise to the rest of the world, lies a middle ground – a middle ground where people with learning disabilities who are in love are able to marry, as quietly or as loudly as they wish, while the world looks on, happy for them but  unsurprised.

When that is achieved, we will know we have taken another step towards an inclusive society. It shouldn’t be so hard, should it?