GAY MARRIAGE? BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, DUTCH SAY: From the Philadelphia Inquirer

Like a lot of politicians, the mayor of Leeuwarden, a small town about 60 miles north of the Dutch capital, is married.

It's just that his spouse happens to be a man.

Same-sex marriage may be making headlines in America, but here in the land of tulips and canals--not to mention state-sanctioned marijuana cafes, brothels and euthanasia--it's yesterday's news.

In 2000, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize gay nuptials. These days they have become so unremarkable that the city council of Leeuwarden felt no compunction in nominating Geert Dales, a former Amsterdam alderman who married his longtime partner in 2002, to lead their midsized borough. ...

Counting the Netherlands, 10 European countries now recognize gay unions. The list includes Belgium, which became the second country to legalize same-sex marriage, and seven others--France, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway--that allow registered partnerships designed to grant homosexual couples the same legal rights as married heterosexuals. Portugal has a more limited civil-unions law.

Among Western Europe's most populous nations, only heavily Catholic Italy, where the Vatican wields significant influence over politics, has not addressed gay partnerships.

The list of countries offering gay-marriage rights is expected to expand. Spain's left-wing prime minister has pledged to grant them, and Sweden's parliament is considering a bill to do the same. Switzerland and Britain are moving toward enacting civil-partnership proposals. Civil unions also are under consideration in Ireland and the Czech Republic.

Gay marriage is legal in Canada's three most populous provinces. In France, a battle is brewing over whether to allow full marriage as well as civil partnerships.

"It's not a particularly fast-moving trend, but it's definitely a trend," said Lee Badgett, a labor economist at the University of Massachusetts who has spent the last seven months in Amsterdam studying same-sex marriage.

Backers of gay unions argue that their existence in Europe has not harmed the institution of marriage as opponents feared it would, and critics have offered no data to refute that. Analysts disagree, though, about whether the European and Canadian political currents propelling acceptance of the unions will migrate to the United States, despite what happened recently in Massachusetts, which on May 17 became the first U.S. state to allow gay marriage.

Badgett doesn't think so.

"I think the patterns in Europe are just so different," she said. "It comes down to raw political power in a lot of cases--most of the countries that did this just don't have the organized religious right that the U.S. does."

There is also a big difference in public opinion. A Gallup Poll in early May found that 55 percent of Americans opposed gay marriage, while about 49 percent favored civil unions. President Bush and many Republicans want a constitutional ban on gay marriage, while his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, supports civil unions but not gay marriage. While Vermont, California, Hawaii and New Jersey now provide some rights to same-sex couples, 39 states have passed laws prohibiting or refusing to recognize same-sex marriage.

But in a February cover story in the National Journal, journalist Paul Starobin argued that change was in the winds, because a recent poll showed that 56 percent of Americans in the 18-to-29 age group favored gay marriage. ...

If so, the American political debate has a long way to move. By the time the Netherlands enacted its same-sex marriage law in late 2000, it already had a civil-unions law that gave gay couples the same rights as married couples over matters such as inheritance and pensions. The marriage right was seen as a largely symbolic but important final step for some gay people, and 70 percent of the Dutch public favored it, according to polls.

Unlike in the United States, even many of the leading Dutch opponents of same-sex marriage said they had no problem with gay civil unions. In fact, they cited the Netherlands' progressive partnership law as an argument against moving to full marriage.

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posted by Eve at 10:45 PM | link

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