In Sweden the Church allows gay marriages · 2009-10-23 18:15
The Lutheran Church of Sweden – the country’s largest – is to conduct same-sex marriages from next month.
Around 70% of the church’s 250-strong synod, or church board, voted to back the move, making it one of few global churches to allow gay marriage.
According to BBC, Sweden’s government introduced a new law in May allowing gay couples the same marriage rights as heterosexuals.
Three-quarters of Swedes are members of the Lutheran church, though church attendance is low.
The Lutheran Church says gay couples can now get married by any of its priests from the beginning of November.
Individual priests will not be “forced” to perform same sex ceremonies, though substitutes will have to be found if they refuse.
The church – which split from state control in 2000 – backed the government’s decision to legalise gay marriage in May.
But some clergy had questioned whether church ceremonies – and the term matrimony – should be reserved for heterosexual unions. Others opposed the move on the grounds it contravened the scriptures.
Sweden’’s largest gay rights group, the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL), welcomed the move.
“[We] congratulate the Church of Sweden for its decision. [The church’s] homosexual and bisexual members will finally be able to feel a little more welcome within society,” the group said in a statement.
Sweden was one of the first countries to give gay couples legal “partnership” rights, in the mid-1990s, and to allow gay couples to adopt children from 2002.
Gay marriages in Europe are recognized now in five countries: Netherlands, (legalised in 2000), Belgium (2003), Spain (2005), Norway (2008) and Sweden, of course.
By the way, according to “SAME-SEX UNIONS AND DIVORCE RISK: DATA FROM SWEDEN”, the study found, that the incidence of same-sex marriage in Norway and Sweden is not particularly impressive in terms of numbers. In Sweden, 1,526 same-sex partnerships were contracted between 1995 and 2002, compared with 280,000 Swedish opposite-sex marriages over the same period. Thus, 5 out of 1000 new partnerships in Sweden were same-gender couples, a ratio that is “considerably lower than the various estimates of fractions [of the population that are] . . . homosexuals.”
In Sweden, 62 percent of same-sex couples in legal unions were male. Same-sex unions differed from opposite-sex married couples in several ways: they were older, better educated, more likely to live in the national capitol, and less likely to have children than opposite-sex marriages.
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