Twenty years ago, just after midnight on April 1, the mayor of Amsterdam married four couples in the City Hall when the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriages.
“There are two reasons to rejoice,” Mayor Job Cohen told the bride and groom before serving pink champagne and pink cake. “He’s celebrating his marriage and he’s also celebrating his right to marry.”
Same-sex marriage is now legal in 28 countries around the world, as well as on the autonomous island of Taiwan. This includes most of Western Europe. However, its spread has been uneven: Taiwan is the only place in Asia that has made the move; South Africa is the only African country that does this.
“If you had told me 20 years ago that same-sex marriage today would be a reality in 29 countries, I wouldn’t have believed you,” said Jessica Stern, executive director of global LGBTQ rights group Outright Action International.
But he noted how polarized the world is in terms of LGBTQ acceptance, with nearly 70 countries continuing to criminalize same-sex relationships.
“Progress has been great, no doubt. But we have a long way to go,” Stern said.
In many countries, even outside of Asia and Africa, opposition to egalitarian marriage remains vehement. In Guatemala, some lawmakers have proposed a bill that would explicitly ban same-sex marriage.
In Poland, President Andrzej Doubt was re-elected last year after a campaign that described the LGBTQ rights movement as more harmful than communism.
Poland is among a solid bloc of Eastern European countries that have resisted same-sex marriage, while 16 Western European countries have legalized it.
Switzerland is on its way to becoming the seventeenth place: its parliament approved the legalization of same-sex marriage in December. But the law has not come into force and opponents are trying to collect enough signatures to require a referendum on the repeal.
Elsewhere, same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica; five South American countries; most of the 32 states of Mexico; Australia and New Zealand.
Together, these countries are home to about 1.2 billion people, about 15% of the world’s population.
Legalization occurred in a number of ways: through court rulings, legislation, and, in the case of Ireland, strong voter support in a 2015 national referendum.
Several European countries, including Italy, Greece, and the Czech Republic, offer civil unions for same-sex couples. But even if these arrangements offer many of the protections of marriage, many LGBTQ activists consider them a degrading second-tier state.
Just two weeks ago, the Vatican’s Orthodox office declared that the Catholic Church will not bless same-sex unions because God “cannot bless sin.”
In the Netherlands, there have been more than 18,000 same-sex marriages since 2001, about 53% of them between two women, according to the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics. Every year, about 400 same-sex marriages break up, the office says.
Amsterdam will celebrate its April 1 anniversary with an online symposium and a “rainbow walk” route along 20 places considered important in the fight for LGBTQ rights.
“There are still grounds for concern,” the city said. “Because equal rights do not automatically lead to everyone being treated the same.”
One of the couples who got married 20 years ago, Gert Kasteel and Dolf Pasker, told AP that their neighbors and partners had warmly accepted them, even though they know the anti-LGBTQ sentiment persists elsewhere.
“For most people, it’s no longer a problem,” Pasker said. “Oh happy day.”
Unlike the Netherlands, there was an 11-year gap in the United States between the first legal same-sex marriages in Massachusetts in 2004 and the 2015 Supreme Court decision that extended legalization nationwide. .
According to the Williams Institute, a group of experts from UCLA Law School that specializes in research on LGBTQ issues, there were 513,000 same-sex married couples in the US. UU. In 2020.
As in other countries that legalize same-sex marriage, popular support for the concept has steadily increased in the U.S. since 2004.
At the time, 42% of Americans thought same-sex marriage should be legalized, according to the Gallup poll. For last year, that figure had reached 67%.
In Africa, where religious and cultural traditions often disapprove of homosexuality, no country seems to be on track to soon join South Africa in legalizing same-sex marriage.
The situation is more fluid in Asia. A bill on same-sex couples has been proposed in the Thai parliament.
In Japan, where some local governments recognize same-sex unions, a court recently ruled that the constitution should allow same-sex marriage.
The decision has no immediate legal effect, but activists say it could influence other court cases and boost their search for a parliamentary debate on same-sex marriage authorization.
India repealed a colonial-era law in 2018 that punished gay sex with up to 10 years in prison, and there are some openly gay celebrities. But same-sex marriage is still illegal; the government says gay and lesbian couples do not guarantee “family unity” status.
As the marriage equality movement took shape in Europe and America over the past 20 years, opponents around the world offered some basic counterarguments.
A common warning related to religious freedom, with some religious leaders predicting repercussions for religions that disapprove of same-sex relationships.
For the most part, religions in countries where people of the same sex marry have been able to maintain their own marriage rites.
However, there have been some highly publicized legal cases, such as one that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and involved a conservative Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
Another argument was that legalizing same-sex marriage would undermine the very institution of marriage.
Attorney Evan Wolfson, who helped orchestrate the movement for equality in U.S. marriage as head of Marry’s Freedom advocacy group, assessed this argument in a recent article in the European Human Rights Law Review .
“The history of marriage is a history of change and expansion of inclusion. … The sky has not fallen when marriage has embraced same-sex couples,” he wrote. “There are enough marriages to share.”