Lebanon and civil marraige

"Change, if it comes, may be slow. The last serious effort to allow civil unions was in 1998. But campaigners notched up a small victory earlier this year when the interior minister, Ziad Baroud, ruled that Lebanese citizens would have the option of removing their religious-group classification from their national identity cards." Let me inform the esteemed Economist correspondent of two things: 1) the person who blocked the civil marriage law in 1998 was none other than Rafiq Hariri. He mobilized his client clercis against it, and it was aborted. 2) the Ziad Barud's ruling is meaningless.