Officials who perform marriage ceremonies in Amsterdam’s New West (Nieuw-West) district will have to undergo an evaluation each year to ascertain their stand on marrying same-sex partners. ...

The district council is currently investigating the case of the second official to see whether she changed her mind since being taken on as a marriage commissioner or whether she told a barefaced lie. Mr Mauer is looking into which disciplinary measures can be taken if it transpires the woman lied. She could face dismissal.

Labels: gay marriage, Netherlands

VOTE

It's been 10 years since Ton Jansen and Louis Rogmans joined three other couples in Amsterdam City Hall to say “ja, ik wil,” triggering an international revolution for gay rights.

On April 1, 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to carry out legal same-sex weddings. Since then nine other nations have legalized gay marriages. Uruguay moved to be the next in early April when a bill legalizing gay marriage was introduced in parliament.

“Gay marriage is Holland's best export product because we have shown that it is possible,” said Vera Bergkamp, head of the Dutch gay rights organization, COC.

In the country that pioneered the movement toward same-sex marriage, however, gays haven't exactly been rushing to tie the knot.

Data from The Netherlands' national statistics agency showed 15,000 gay couples have married since 2001. That means just 20 percent of gay Dutch couples are married, compared to 80 percent of heterosexual couples, the agency says.

Bergkamp sees three main reasons for the lack of nuptial enthusiasm among gay couples: less pressure from family and friends, fewer gay couples marrying to have children than their straight counterparts, and a more individualist, less family-orientated mindset among many homosexuals.

Labels: gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, Netherlands

VOTE

I've been in the Netherlands for nearly three months now, and I've come to one overwhelming conclusion: Dutch women are not like me. I worry about my career incessantly. I take daily stock of its trajectory and make vicious mental critiques of my endeavors. And I know—based on weekly phone conversations with friends in the United States—that my masochistic drive for success is widely shared among my female friends. Meanwhile, the Dutch women around me take a lackadaisical approach to their careers. They work half days, meet their friends for coffee at 2 p.m., and pity their male colleagues who are stuck in the office all day.

Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way. Incentives to nudge women into full-time work have consistently failed. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises. Some women cite the high cost of child care as a major factor in their shorter hours, but 62 percent of women working part time in the Netherlands don't have young children in the house, and mothers rarely increase their working hours even when their children leave home.

It's hard not to wonder: Have we gotten it all wrong? In the United States, the race for equality has gone mostly in one direction. Women want to shatter the glass ceiling, reach the top spots in the hierarchy, and earn the same respect and salaries as men do. But perhaps this situation is setting us up for a world in which none of us is having any fun. After all, studies of female happiness in the U.S. find that even as our options have increased and we have become financially more independent than in any previous time in our history, American women as a whole are not getting any happier. If anything, the studies show that we are emotionally less well-off than we were before. Wasn't the whole point of the fight for equality in the workplace to improve our wellbeing?

Dutch women could be considered extremely progressive when compared with most other women in the world—they have enviable reproductive rights and rates of political participation. But they are often responsible for only a small portion of the family income—25 percent of Dutch women do not even make enough money to be considered financially independent. The gap in pay between genders is among the highest in Europe, but because women are working only part time, this is not fodder for gender wars. Instead, women are more concerned with protecting their right to part-time work. In 2000, a law was passed mandating that women have the right to cut back hours at their jobs without repercussions from employers. ...

Dutch women's refusal to seek longer hours has long bewildered economists. In the spring, the United Nations, suspicious that there was something keeping women from full-time jobs, launched an inquiry to see whether the Netherlands was in compliance with the women's rights treaty. A comprehensive 2009 study by Alison L. Booth & Jan C. Van Ours looked at the amount of time women in the Netherlands spend at work compared with women in other European countries. The authors assumed that part-time work was less desirable but ultimately confirmed that Dutch women don't want to spend more time at work. The NIS News Bulletin interpreted the results of the study as: "Attempts to get more women working full-time are doomed to failure because nobody has a desire for this. Both the women themselves and their partners and employers are satisfied with the Dutch part-time culture for women."

Labels: culture, economics, gender, Netherlands, women, work/family policy

VOTE

Oxytocin is often thought of as a "love drug," and is linked with all kinds of feel-good emotions in people such as trust, empathy and generosity. Increasingly, however, scientists are finding that the hormone has a dark side—and now researchers have discovered it also can promote ethnocentrism, potentially fueling xenophobia, prejudice and violence.

Past studies have shown that oxytocin fosters social feelings—between mates, for example, or mother and child—which explains why this "cuddle chemical" might be linked with goody-goody behavior such as altruism. Social feelings, however, are not always positive ones, reasoned social psychologist Carsten de Dreu of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. For instance, ethnocentric people view their own group as better than others—they feel closer to their compatriots, but potentially at the expense of outsiders.

In five experiments 280 male Dutch volunteers first inhaled a spray containing either oxytocin or a placebo. In the first two experiments participants hit one button if they saw a positive word such as "wonderful" or the name of a fellow Dutchman on the computer, such as Maarten; they pushed another key if they saw a negative word such as "awful" or a foreign name. These groupings were then reversed—the volunteers pushed one button if they saw a positive word or a foreign name, and the other if they saw a negative word or a domestic name.

Arab names such as Ahmed were used in the first experiment and German ones such as Helmut in the second. The researchers found that in both cases, volunteers given oxytocin were faster at linking fellow Dutchmen with positive words. There was also significant evidence that Arabs were more often linked with negative words, and weaker signs that Germans were. ...

In the last experiments volunteers were given the option to save the lives of five nameless people by sacrificing one other person. These lone individuals either had typical Dutch male names, or foreign ones—Arab names in the fourth experiment and German ones in the fifth. Participants given oxytocin sacrificed foreigners more often than fellow Dutchmen. This isn't because they mercilessly sacrificed more outsiders than volunteers given placebo did—rather, they protectively sacrificed fewer fellow Dutchmen.

Labels: Netherlands, oxytocin

VOTE

What do our weddings tell us about ourselves? My mum always used to say that the more pretentious the wedding (allowing for the wealth of the participants), the greater the likelihood of the marriage failing. She reckoned that ostentatious ceremonies and receptions expressed insecurities about the relationship, and the individuals themselves.

It's certainly true that as divorce became commoner, expenditure on weddings increased massively. The average cost of a wedding today is £11-17,000 (estimates vary). Few readers will also have failed to notice that the average cost of attending them is painful: a total of £6.1bn is spent every year, racking up an average of £290 for each guest, when new outfits, nights at a hotel, presents, travel and beauty treatments are factored in.

Meanwhile, the annual number of divorces quadrupled between 1958 and 1972. The trend peaked in 1993, declining thereafter. Why do we spend more on weddings, despite a greater risk that the marriage will end in divorce? One clue might be that there is an increased yearning for marriage to deliver love. In the 1960s, when asked whether they would marry a hypothetical partner with all desirable qualities, but without love, 40% of women said that they would. By the late 1980s, that had fallen to 15%. It could be that the bigger spend on the wedding is a misconceived attempt to convince oneself and others that the union will last and that love will prevail, despite the divorce statistics.

One Dutch study tested aspects of that theory among 572 couples. It hypothesised that lavish wedding displays make the couple feel more secure. Common uncertainties include fears about the chosen partner, whether to get married and what life will be like afterwards. By impressing an audience for the commitment with large expenditure, these fears may be diminished, and commitment to each other and their new roles increased.

Labels: culture, divorce, Marriage, Netherlands

VOTE

Hell doesn’t freeze over, the land is not engulfed in floods or flaming brimstone, and the participants are not struck dead by lightening. Neither do married straight people rush to divorce court to end their association with the now-sullied institution or reform their behavior to prove that they really are better than gay people. Instead, at least in the case of the Netherlands which has allowed gay marriage since 2001, gay people get married for much the same reasons as straight people while the marital behavior of straight people scarcely changes at all.

This is the conclusion of When Gay People Get Married, a refreshingly even-tempered and well-researched book by M.V. Lee Badgett, a Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Public Policy & Administration at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and research director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law. ...

So gay marriage seems to be good for gay people: how does it affect straight people? According to the conservative commentator Stanley Kurtz, it hastens moral decline by separating the act of procreation from the act of marriage. He points to decreasing marriage rates in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, the increase in unmarried heterosexual couples, and increasing numbers of children born outside of wedlock as evidence that straight people take legal recognition of gay marriage as a sign that parenthood and marriage need no longer be connected.

But Badgett refutes these conclusions by looking at marriage rates in six countries, five of which have a long history of granting rights to same sex couples: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands, and the United States. All six have seen a decline in marriage rates since the 1970s, but several of the countries which allow gay marriage have seen an increase since the ‘90s (while the US has not). She doesn’t attribute the increase to the influence of gay marriage (the trend started earlier) but points out that the historical data offers no support for Kurtz’s opinions. Similarly, divorce rates and nonmarital birth rates showed little change after the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Labels: cohabitation, Europe, gay marriage, M.V. Lee Badgett, Marriage, Netherlands, out-of-wedlock births, Stanley Kurtz

VOTE

There was spontaneous applause when Allan Carlson announced the winner of the 'family cup': a man who put nine children on the world, all within the same marriage.

That makes one a successful man in the eyes of the fifth World Congress of Families, which is being held in Amsterdam's RAI congress centre this week. The floor was then given to the winner's wife, who spoke of her husband's love and dedication to their family and God -- until he died of cancer last year.

Allan Carlson is the secretary of the World Congress of Families and the president of the US-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society. He is the author of The Natural Family: A Manifesto, in which he argues that "we welcome more babies and larger families while others wage war against human fertility".

In his opening statement in Amsterdam on Monday he said families that deviate from the 'natural family' (man, wife, children) are at considerable risk of developing 'problems'. "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state," Carlson said. ...

One of the speakers –- albeit via video link –- was the Dutch minister for youth and family André Rouvoet, a member of the orthodox Christian party ChristenUnie. Rouvoet wished the participants "every success".

Rouvoet's participation in the World Congress was controversial from the start. His critics said it legitimised what they said was a right-wing religious gathering. Intellectuals, members of parliament for the Green party and the liberal parties VVD and D66, as well as a handful of demonstrators demanded that Rouvoet either stay away from the gathering or come out in favour of gay marriage, abortion and divorce.

The minister didn't go quite that far, although he did call on the participants to "build bridges" and to "think about how we can live together in a multicultural society with differing attitudes to the family".

Labels: abortion, divorce, Europe, family size, gay marriage, Marriage, Netherlands

VOTE