April 2, 2016
The city of Amsterdam released a video yesterday titled 15 Years of Equal Marriage.
The video shows the city celebrating and looking back on the four same-sex weddings that were held at city hall on 1 April 2001. The weddings were officiated by Job Cohen, the former mayor of Amsterdam, at midnight.
(Video: Vimeo / Amsterdam; image: crop of a still from the video)
Tags: Amsterdam, gay marriage, human rights, marriage, same-sex, Stopera
August 30, 2011
Since 2001 practicing, recognised Christian bureaucrats down at city hall where told that part of their job was to marry everbody, including gays and lesbians. Christian Democrat Minister of Education, Culture and Science Maria Van Bijsterveld said that practicing Christians could refuse to marry gays and lesbians on religious grounds, as long as it does not go against the basic principes set out in the Dutch constitution — they cannot refuse on the basis of race. Therefore, Christians can refuse to marry gays and lesbians, but not an Asian couple. Even my argument assumes the practicing Christian in question is white and has light coloured hair.
According to Piet Hein Donner, Christian Democrat Minister of the Interior, anyone of any other faith does not have the right to refuse to marry anybody on those same grounds. Christian are therefore protected by law, but other people have to just do their job and shut up. In my book, that’s discrimination. Or favouritism.
And so we’ve learnt two painful facts about the current Dutch government: Christians are above people of other faiths and people of other ethnic backgrounds are better than gays.
No one ever got the memo that the Dutch constitution has an apartheid-like reading to it. Parliament plans to have a lovely discussion about this state of affairs.
(Link geenstijl.nl, Photo of the Saint Gertrude cathedral in Utrecht by Wikimedia user pepijntje, some rights reserved)
Tags: Christians, discrimination, ethnicity, gay marriage, race
March 27, 2011
April 1 marks the tenth anniversary of gay marriage in the Netherlands. In that period some 15,000 same-sex couples got hitched here, making 1 in 5 same-sex couples married. Four in five heterosexual couples are married, AD reports.
Jan Latten of Statistics Netherlands told the paper that gays marry for the same reasons as straights—love, children and security—, that the relative number of divorces between the groups are virtually the same, and that both groups have the same preferences for wedding months: “spring and summer”.
See also:
(Photo by CarbonNYC, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
Tags: gay marriage, marriage, statistics, traits
January 8, 2011
Since 2001 tax forms have had a checkbox that allowed two people living together to declare a ‘fiscal partnership’, a relationship just for tax purposes. It appears (I never looked it up before), that if you and somebody else declare a fiscal partnership you get certain tax breaks, such as mortgage interest deductions for the highest earner.
This year the law has changed. It is no longer enough to declare to the tax people that you and Bob are partners, you and Bob need to have some legal status to confirm this. A wedding certificate is good, as is a registered partnership (civil union) or a notarized ‘cohabitation agreement’. The latter is used for non-intimate relationships (think father-son) and sometimes for uncommon intimate relationships (think polyamorous). What also works is owning a house together or having children together. Couples who never got around to making it ‘official’ now have a decision to take.
Interestingly, married couples who are estranged may wish to explore the possibility of a divorce under the new tax regime, Elsevier reports. You see, this new fiscal partnership is obligatory. It is harder to get into, but you cannot opt out either. One reason for such a divorce could be if each partner owns a house, so that they both can get their own mortgage interest deductions.
Another way to become fiscal partners is to have a partner recognised by one’s pension fund.
The people that may be inconvenienced the most by this measure is those who refuse to divorce for religious reasons, even if they no longer live together—a situation called ‘separated from table and bed’ in Dutch, and legally recognized as such, just no longer by the tax people.
(Photo by Eunice Chang, some rights reserved)
Tags: civil unions, contract law, families, gay marriage, income tax, marriage, politics, taxes
October 12, 2008
A few months ago I wrote the following article on the Amsterdam Weekly blog about a French homosexual having his nationality revoked for marrying a Dutchman:
“Frédéric used to be French, but because he married a Dutchman, the French Embassy forced him to give up his French nationality. The French consulate revoked his nationality because they did not want to recognise his marriage when he also acquired the Dutch nationality. According to an agreement between France and the Netherlands, anyone who opts for the nationality of the other country automatically loses their original nationality, unless they are married to a person of the other nationality, in which case dual citizenship is automatically awarded.
The consulate declared Frédéric unmarried and wants him to hand in his passport, ID card and has told him he is banned from voting. Frédéric, very much attached to his home country, is terribly upset.
Tanguy Le Breton, the official representative of the French community in the Netherlands, calls this “blatant discrimination”. “It’s obvious that the French authorities discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. In this case, the discrimination is symbolically terrible because we are depriving homosexuals of their nationality. It is about time to start a debate on the issue and put an end to this discrimination.”
Frédéric is French again
This summer Frédéric got his French nationality back thanks to the efforts of people like French gay Amsterdam politician and author Laurent Chambon who spread the news and got things moving. The entire “reintegration process” took a speedy two months and was aided by a high Sarkozy cabinet official, Emmanuelle Mignon. Frédéric still had to show his birth certificate, national ID cards (1995 and 2004) his passport, proof he had become Dutch in 2006, and proof he kept ties with France by being registered with the consulate in Amsterdam.
What happened to Frédéric will probably never happen again to any French person in the Netherlands, as the law will change as of March 2009. Any French person marrying a Dutch person will not have their French nationality automatically revoked.
(Link: laurentchambon.blogspot.com (in French))
Tags: Amsterdam, gay marriage, homophobia, identity, nationality
May 2, 2008
Frédéric used to be French, but because he married a Dutchman, the French Embassy forced him to give up his French nationality. The French consulate revoked his nationality because they did not want to recognise his marriage when he also acquired the Dutch nationality. According to an agreement between France and the Netherlands, anyone who opts for the nationality of the other country automatically loses their original nationality, unless they are married to a person of the other nationality, in which case dual citizenship is automatically awarded.
The consulate declared Frédéric unmarried and wants him to hand in his passport, ID card and has told him he is banned from voting. Frédéric, very much attached to his home country, is terribly upset.
Tanguy Le Breton, the official representative of the French community in the Netherlands, calls this “blatant discrimination”. “It’s obvious that the French authorities discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. In this case, the discrimination is symbolically terrible because we are depriving homosexuals of their nationality. It is about time to start a debate on the issue and put an end to this discrimination.”
All this just in time for the International Day Against Homophobia and the very same day I happen to have a meeting with the French Embassy in The Hague about French music…
(Link (in French): kreukreuscopie)
Tags: citizenship, discrimination, French, gay marriage
