Courtesy of Andrew Godfrey at “Why The Silence Stonewall?”, we now seem to have a copy of the mysterious Stonewall consultation, which he’s also raised some good points about.

But don’t get too excited, as it looks like it’s just been a surveymonkey.com link mailed around to current donors some time yesterday. The second page of the survey contains a list of objectives for people to rate in terms of importance. “Civil Partnerships” (I don’t know why it’s called that and not Marriage Equality) is one of twelve choices, amongst usual Stonewall items such as tackling Homophobic bullying and working with the Media. “Civil Partnerships” gets just two lines of explanation, describing it as “Work to extend the legal form of marriage to gay people” without much of the colourful positive spin put on the other options which all rate at least four lines of description.

Is this Stonewall trying to justify their position by carrying out a survey they hope will support them? I don’t know. It could equally be that this is a long-planned survey and the short shrift given to Marriage Equality is because it’s been added in quite close to the deadline following all the recent fuss.

It might even be that Stonewall are preparing to U-Turn on Marriage Equality and need the completed consultation so they have some way of saving face in their press releases. I can imagine what they’d write already:
“Now we have completed our consultation on Stonewall’s priorities, we’re pleased to support this campaign…“