Germany’s first gay couples to be married will tie the knot tomorrow, after decades of struggle that campaigners say still has ground to make up.
Couples will convert existing civil partnerships or set the seal on their relationships for the first time in Berlin, while others exchange rings in Hannover, Hamburg and other cities.
Local authorities rushed to get weddings under way as soon as possible, after lawmakers voted on June 30 to give Germany’s about 94,000 same-sex couples the right to marry.
However, German bureaucracy being what it is, government software will be unable to officially record two men or two women as married until next year — meaning some online paperwork will still register them as “husband” and “wife.”
“Finally our country is joining the rest of Europe,” said Joerg Steinert, head of gay and lesbian rights organization LSVD in Berlin and Brandenburg state.
The Netherlands was the first country to legalize gay marriage in 2000, followed piecemeal by 14 European neighbors, such as Spain, Sweden, Britain and France.
However, Germany made do with a 2001 civil partnership law, extended over the years to remove more and more gaps between gay and straight couples’ rights.
That was “a first breach in the institution,” Steinert said, paving the way for tomorrow’s “very symbolic step.”
“We won’t be a second-class couple any longer,” Bode Mende, who, with partner Karl Kreil, will form the first couple to marry in Berlin, told newspaper Neues Deutschland on Thursday.
Mende and Kreil, together since 1979, have for years campaigned for equal marriage rights.
The law now reads “marriage binds two people of different sexes or the same sex for life.”
By extending existing law to same-sex pairs, they automatically gain the same tax advantages and adoption rights as heterosexual families, avoiding the endless back-and-forth in some nations over adoption.
Along with the Greens party, the LSVD began its battle for equal marriage rights around 1990.
Same-sex relationships have since become so normalized that polls show about 75 percent of Germans are in favor of gay marriage.
Unlike in France, there were no rallies of hundreds of thousands against the law.
“Lots of people were amazed by the end that it hadn’t already happened, asking themselves, ‘surely we have that already?’” said lawmaker Johannes Kahrs, gay and lesbian affairs commissioner for the SPD — who himself will act as witness in a close friend’s wedding tomorrow.
Kahrs enjoyed a flash of fame in June, when he laid into the snap decision by German Chancellor Angela Merkel allowing conservative lawmakers to follow their conscience on a gay marriage vote — the trigger for the rush to pass a bill.
“Thank you for nothing, Frau Merkel,” he stormed, pounding the lectern in the Bundestag with rage.
Merkel said her thinking changed after a “memorable experience,” when she met a lesbian couple who lovingly care for eight foster children in her constituency.
Nonetheless, she voted against the bill, saying the German constitution still defines marriage as “the union of a man and a woman.”
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