The 10-Year Milestone: A Cause for Celebration

[Guest fountainhall]

This April we should all be celebrating a milestone in the campaign for gay rights. But here in Asia it has gone almost totally unnoticed.

 

Ten years ago this month, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriages. Whilst most Dutch people were in favour of the law, a vocal majority spouted all those silly arguments we have heard so many times since then – including that gay marriage is wrong and it will spell the end of Western civilization. And that vocal minority ensured that passage of the bill in the Dutch parliament became a political slugfest.

 

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, one of the sponsors of the bill, Boris Dittrich, tells more of the story.

 

I was a member of parliament at the time and the initial sponsor of the same-sex legislation. The Netherlands had introduced gay civil unions in 1998; I regarded them as a step forward but still insufficient. Why should heterosexuals be able to fence off a part of civil law — marriage — and defend it as exclusively theirs? This "separate but equal" status reminded me of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow in the United States. When two people decide to share their responsibilities and commit themselves to each other by entering civil marriage, their sexual orientation shouldn't matter to the government.

 

The Christian Democrat party was fiercely opposed though. Many of its members and those in other right-wing Christian political parties announced that if the bill passed, it would devalue the institution of marriage, open a can of legal worms and cause the rest of the world to shun the Netherlands . . .

 

A decade later, of the nearly 75,000 civil marriages that take place in the Netherlands each year, about 1,400 involve same-sex couples. Heterosexual couples did not turn away from the institution of marriage, nor did the world isolate my country. Civilization as we know it did not end. And, as far as I can tell, God did not punish the Netherlands.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dittrich-gay-marriage-20110417,0,5942017.story

 

So, let’s celebrate what has been achieved so far and those like Boris Dittrich who helped make it possible.

[Guest JamesBarnes]

Hear, hear!

 

Thanks for bringing this matter into the light, dear fountainhall.

 

Best wishes,

 

James.

[pong]

This Dittrich (he is the son of Czech immigrants to NL-who fled after the Prahy velvet revolution under Dubcek) now works for Human Right Watch, specially after the rights for gays. His position is paid for by an unknown benevolent person. He has also just published a crime-detective.

The gay monthly magazine/newsppr the Gay Krant has abundantly congratulated itself with this achieved milestone-and asked all who benefitted from it to give a donation-this mag. struggels to survive.

Figures after 10 years are a bit disappointing: just under 3% of all marriages (that nr is also going gown the last years-but there are fewer youth and more older people) are same-sex and nearly 2/3 of those same-sex are by ladies/lesbians. Of course there has been a surge when it was allowed 10 yrs ago, now flattened out. But the general tendency is for lower nrs and also lower % of totals.

The main advantage a gay marriage brings is to the heritage: the surviving member of a married couple gains all -any children (their own or adopted) get a claim on their legal share, but that has to wait till the other dies-and s/he may have eaten it all up by then. This thus avoids nasty struggles with other family members (brothers/sisters) of the gay deceased. There may be a tax advantage-or not, this is all dependent on spread and level of income.