EUROPEAN GAY UNION TRENDS INFLUENCE U.S.: From USA Today

The Netherlands, known for its picturesque windmills and its picture-window red-light district, was the first country to legalize gay marriage in 2001. Two years later, Belgium followed.

Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Luxembourg, which all offer some form of civil partnership rights, are expected to pass laws allowing same-sex marriages this year or early in 2005. And Britain is discussing civil partnership rights for gay and lesbian couples, including the right to inherit property, take over an apartment lease and make decisions for a loved one in the hospital.

Europe's experience with gay marriage and civil partnerships is influencing this week's debate in Washington about amending the U.S. Constitution to forbid gay marriage. On Capitol Hill, members of the Senate are expected to vote as early as today on the Federal Marriage Amendment. ...

Marriage trend data, however, are controversial. When the Dutch approved same-sex marriage, hundreds of gay and lesbian couples rushed down the aisle, as have many in Massachusetts since May, when the state became the first to legalize same-sex marriage. But since the law went into effect, the number of gay couples tying the knot in the Netherlands has dropped 40% to 1,500 last year. The number of gay marriages this year is lower still. Roughly one in 10 of the Netherlands' estimated 55,000 same-sex couples are married.

Advocates say the small numbers show the heated debate over gay marriage in the USA is overblown. "In Holland and Belgium, there's no news about gay marriage at all; nobody talks about it," says Lluis Prats, a lawyer working in the European Union headquarters here. Prats recently married his partner in Brussels. "Once Americans realize there is not a big monster coming to strike in our society, then people may change their views about how gay marriage is dealt with in the States."

Opponents of gay marriage say the drop in gay marriages in the Netherlands is only half the picture: The number of heterosexual couples getting married also is declining, while the number of illegitimate children has almost tripled since 1989. Last year, almost one in three children in the Netherlands were born out of wedlock. In the USA, a third of births were out of wedlock in 2002, and the divorce rate was among the highest in the Western world.

Gay marriage is only one of the factors changing the structure of families in the Netherlands, anthropologist Stanley Kurtz says. To this, he adds the decline of religion, the rise in the number of couples living together and their almost-equal legal status as married couples under Dutch law. "They are all part of a way of thinking about marriage, where the idea of marriage becomes detached from thinking about parenthood," says Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who testified on the issue before the House Judiciary Committee in April. ...

Britain is among a few countries in Western Europe that have yet to grant such rights to same-sex couples. Others include Ireland and Italy. The British House of Lords introduced a civil partnership bill, which the House of Commons is expected to take up this fall.

Elizabeth Allum and Tilly Clarke of Reading, England, want full marriage rights. Two years ago, they had a Humanist wedding ceremony (Humanism is a faith based on respect for human life), but that doesn't give them any legal rights. That could be an issue one day because they want to have a family.

While marriage seems to be losing its significance for many heterosexual couples in Europe, couples such as Allum and Clarke say marriage is a special status, a symbol of equality, and worth fighting for. "We want the respect that marriage brings," Allum says, "because all of the reasons people get married are the reasons we got married. We want some kind of recognition that it's one of the most important things we'll ever do in our lives."

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posted by Eve at 4:22 PM VOTE

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