There are a number of issues here. One, of course, is the theat which IdiotSavant refers to; bullshit scaremongering by the celebrant mafia. The other is, more generally, how the business of providing celebrants is provided in New Zealand.
Let me tell you a little story. The better part of a decade ago I got married. We had a number of requirements for our wedding, and one of those was that we were not interested in any kind of religious ceremony. Given about a third of Kiwis identify as non-religious in any given census this is hardly an unusual situation; it’s also one that celebrants are tailor made for.
Unfortunately this is where theory and practise get all buggered up. A search of local celebrants revealed that the ones available were all what might be less than charitably described and evangelical New Age Fruit Loops, possessing both the unlovely habit of insisting that I really am religious if only I understood that I believed what they believed, and, more to the point, too addicted to their belief system not to try and inject it. Which is not only incredibly offensive, but it defeats the whole damn point of have celebrants available. If I wanted religious nonsense at my wedding I’d go to the Catholics. At least they have some style, a sense of occasion.
Where it went horribly wrong, instead of merely wrong? Well, we spoke to a relative who we’d be happy to have officiate. He has a certain gravitas, and passed all the requirements for a celebrant: a resepected position in the community, several other people had independently asked him to become a celebrant in order to officiate at weddings, and so on. When he started looking into jumping through the hoops, though, he was told to bugger off. Why? Because there were “enough” celebrants and if they let any more people become celebrants it would “undercut people’s living”.
Fuck that. Sorry, but need for a celebrant that’s interested in serving the (rather large) segment of the community that wants non-religious services is actually quite a bit more important than a government-sponsored monopoly for a bunch of religious folks to make a living when they can’t persuade a bunch of people to build church and pay for the lifestyle they want. And the DIA have no business acting on behalf of a cartel in defiance of the legislatively-directed requirements for celebrants.
I’d vaguely hoped that things had changed from when we got hitched—which ultimately involved us getting a formal doco done at a registry office and having the big event mock-celebrated with a non-celebrant to work around this flavour of bullshit—but if the tactics adopted by June Russell to put the frighteners on suggest I’d be dissapointed if I needed to inquire closely on the topic.
