Gay Marriage

Gay Marriage In The News In the United States, there is social unrest regarding the government's denial of the right to marry for homosexuals. Plenty of conservatives are completely against gay marriage; and many of liberals are fighting for equal treatment. The neo-Christian politicians are using religious arguments to establish that homosexuality is an abomination. While this may be their belief system, this country was founded on religious freedom, where the people are allowed to worship how they see fit. A ground rule, set up from the beginning, states that separation needs to be made between religion and government, so the two shall never meld to become a theocracy. With the issue of gay marriage, lines get blurred and religion rears its head to influence a government's decision of who shall be married and who will be refused. The history of gay marriage spans decades, even centuries of undocumented ceremonies and commitments. While I would like to delve into the long history, I must stick to modern accounting of gay marriage and government's role in this record keeping. Denmark became a trailblazing country, leading the way for the concept of registering same-sex couples in what we know as a civil union. This pioneering country voted on a law to register domestic partnership of gay couples on May 26, 1989. The law went into force on October 1, 1989. Shortly after the groundbreaking decision in Denmark, other European countries followed suit with registration for gay partnerships. The following countries have some type of registration for homosexual partnerships: Norway, Sweden, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, The Netherlands, France, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, and Finland. While European countries were progressively trying to resolve the gay marriage issue, in the United States there were struggles to support gay marriage as a governmental approved institution. The first success was in Hawaii on December 3, 1996 at 11:03 a.m., when a lower