Apparently, on the other side of the Atlantic, February 10-16 is Freedom to Marry Week (the 11th edition this year). As far as I know, this isn’t done in Sweden, but marriage equality and a gender neutral marriage law is very much on the political agenda right now, and it looks like a proposition on changing the marriage law will be presented by the government during this term of office. And a recent poll showed that 71 percent of Swedes are in favor of same sex marriage (more here).
Of course the opposition - in parliamentary politics only represented by the Christian Democrats, a minority party in the now ruling four party coalition - is loud. They try to push the idea that they do in fact speak for the majority, and when the result of the poll was published, they argued that people had misunderstood the question and wasn’t really aware of what a change in marriage law would mean. (Brimstone! Man and dog! The end of civilization!)
Their main arguments are the usual suspects.
1. “Won’t somebody please think of the children”. Well, I know that fundies of all stripes and colors have a hard time grasping this, but marriage and children are separate entities. Children is no direct outcome of marriage, and marriage is no prerequisite for children, legally or biologically.
A law which allows same sex couples to marry does nothing to their ability to have children. When I got married, my ability to have children did not change. Neither will it for same sex couples.
Equally, preventing same sex couples from marrying will not hinder them from having children. There are already an unknown number of children living with same sex parents in Sweden. If you really want to “protect” them, and any future children of homosexuals, you need to sterilize all gays and lesbians, repeal the laws that makes adoption and insemination legal, and get the social services to take custody of all the children that are already in same sex families. This has nothing to do with marriage whatsoever.
2. “What’s next?! Dogs and coffee tables and your own daughter and forty women oh my!” (a.k.a. the slippery slope argument). Today, the right to marry is limited by five factors: sex, age, relationship, number and species. Changing one of them does not mean that they all change. There is no “inherent” logic saying that a change in one of them, will bring on a change in all. For example, in 2006, France raised the age limit by which girls can marry from 15 to 18 years of age. I’m sure similar changes has been made elsewhere, also in Sweden, and this doesn’t seem to have changed any of the other factors. No slippery slope there, then.
(And to state the obvious: When we were to get married, me and the husband-to-be, had to sign a paper stating that to the best of our knowledge, we weren’t related nor were we already married to someone else (and maybe some other stuff which I now have forgotten) - the consideration of impediments to marriage (yes, I had to look that up in the dictionary). We had to sign this paper. As far as I know, neither dogs nor coffee tables can sign legally binding agreements. Neither can they answer “yes” when the officiant asks, you know, the question. The argument is so stupid, but it keeps getting dragged up again and again.)
And please, God has nothing to do with this. God is not mentioned in the marriage law. In the eyes of the state, a marriage is a legal contract which grants certain rights and responsibilities. The problem is that today, certain religious associations (the Church of Sweden, but also others) have the legal right to wed people. The right is also given to non-religious persons, such as judges, and others that have been approved by the state. That religious associations have the right to exercise public authority is strange, to say the least, especially since the state and the Church of Sweden have been separated for eight years now (yes I know it’s weird that we, one of the world’s most secular countries, had a national church for that long). Make marriage separate from religion! If people want to have a Swedish church ceremony, or a Muslim one, or Jewish, or Wiccan, or whatever, that’s fine. If you feel that your marriage isn’t “real” unless you have promised this and that in front of God and the congregation, or have danced seven times backwards around a fox den at full moon, by all means go ahead and do it. But it has nothing to do with the law, and it should have no legal implications.
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