Pragmatism for Dutch on Gay Marriage

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/world/europe/08iht-letter08.html

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AMSTERDAM — From where the two rights advocates sit, having tea in an old-fashioned high-ceilinged restaurant in Amsterdam’s central train station, the political drama surrounding gay marriage in countries like France, Britain and the United States seems far away.

Eunice den Hoedt, 38, an official with the Ministry of Education, is a lesbian, and René van Soeren, 54, a consultant, is gay. Neither has married, although as Dutch citizens, they’ve had that right for more than 11 years.

As board members of COC Netherlands, the world’s oldest gay rights organization, they still relish the political victory won in 2001 when marriage became an option for everyone here, gay as well as straight. The Netherlands was the first country to adopt such a law; since then, 10 others have followed.

“Gay marriage is the jewel in the crown of the gay rights movement,” Ms. den Hoedt said with a hint of triumph. Yet here in Amsterdam, the novelty of those first same-sex weddings wore off long ago, giving way to the normalcy that Ms. den Hoedt and Mr. van Soeren say was the goal all along. Normal is when Ms. den Hoedt’s mother, who in 2001 considered marriage between two women to be “ludicrous,” now keeps asking her daughter — as mothers do — when she’s going to marry her partner of 14 years.

“It’s important to live in a country that treats you equally,” Mr. van Soeren said. “Before, we didn’t have role models. The idea that two women or two men could have a family, that their dreams could be the same as other people’s, was not possible.”

The Netherlands’ modern gay rights movement scored its first political success in the 1970s, when laws were changed to make the age of consent the same for homosexuals and heterosexuals. “That was the start of the idea that we were really equal,” Ms. den Hoedt said.

In 1998, a law was adopted that allowed gays to register their partnerships, but marriage — which has legal implications for shared property, inheritance and parenthood — was always the goal. Today, there are about 16,000 married same-sex couples in the Netherlands, a country of 16.7 million.

Gay or straight, married, divorced, single or cohabiting, the Dutch — like many other Europeans — have been quietly rearranging their family structures over the past decade.

The total number of new marriages here dropped from 89,428 in 1999 to 71,572 in 2011 (of which 1,355 were same-sex). In the meantime, the number of heterosexual couples opting for registered partnerships has jumped from 1,500 in 1999 to 8,343 last year, while the number of same-sex partnerships has stayed steady around 500 since 2001.

Gay families are just one part of this changing landscape, which may explain the matter-of-fact attitude registered in a 2006 poll in which 82 percent of Dutch respondents said they backed same-sex marriages — the highest approval rate in the European Union. When the law passed in 2001, the approval rate was 62 percent, according to a BBC poll.

“I think the shift happened when people saw that it didn’t impact society in any way,” Ms. den Hoedt said, “while it made a big difference for the self-recognition and esteem of gay people.”

It may not be possible to replicate the Dutch experience in other countries where powerful political forces, including churches, are mobilized against gay marriage, and particularly gay parenthood.

Last month, about 70,000 people, mostly led by Catholic groups, took to the streets of Paris to protest a gay marriage law that’s been introduced by the Socialist president of France, François Hollande. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron is facing a rebellion from within his Conservative Party ranks over the issue.

Yet opinion polls in most European countries continue to show an astonishing change in public attitudes toward homosexuality. In a recent poll by Ifop-Le Monde, 65 percent of French people interviewed said they were in favor of gay marriage, compared with 51 percent in 1995. An Ifop pollster said he could think of few subjects about which “society has changed its views so profoundly and in such little time.”

In the Netherlands, many churches, Catholic and Protestant, opposed the gay marriage law but never mounted a strong offensive against it. It was no coincidence that the 2001 law was passed by a Dutch coalition government that, for the first time in 70 years, did not include a major Christian party.

Since then, the country’s major Christian parties have also shifted. Several recently supported a new law that would give parental rights to both members of same-sex couples, not just the biological parent.

As their landmark gay marriage law continues into its second decade, the Dutch are left tidying up its loose ends. On the agenda is a move to end the right of civil servants to refuse to register gay marriages if they say it is against their conscience or their religion. They can do so only on the condition that someone else in their municipality will officiate at the ceremony.

That clause, which originated as a compromise, may be phased out by another one.

According to COC Netherlands, there are precisely 40 local officials in the country today who refuse to register gay marriages. Under a proposed amendment, those 40 would maintain the right to bow out of gay marriage ceremonies until they retire. But new civil servants entering the state bureaucracy will be henceforth required to promise to register all marriages, gay as well as straight.

“This is a country that likes to find pragmatic solutions to problems,” Mr. van Soeren said with obvious pride.