This past Sunday, Sweden’s Lutheran church ordained its first openly gay bishop, 55 year old Eva Brunne becoming bishop of Stockholm’s diocese. Two weeks earlier, the Church passed a proposal permitting priests to marry same sex couples. Brunne lives with her registered partner and the couple has a child.
A study by M.V. Lee Badgett, both the director of Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law & Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law, and professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, on the effect of legalizing gay marriage in Netherlands reveals some significant findings relevant to the battle currently being waged in the United States. Badgett says that her survey suggests that “same sex couple will fit right into our current understanding of marriage in the U.S. Marriage itself will not be affected. Dutch heterosexuals appear to have adapted to the legal change by changing how they see same sex couples, not how they see marriage.” Badgett added that the difference between the idea of a marriage and a civil union is profound, and has meaning beyond simple semantics, she saying that “only marriage has the social understanding to back up the legal status, and the social meaning is as important as the legal rights.”
Ellen DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show Monday, the twosome obviously so in love, de Rossi, whose comedic talent is endless, saying that she knew DeGeneres was the one when she “first laid eyes on her,” but added that it “took me three years to actually tell her how I felt about her, because I was on Ally McBeal at the time and wasn’t living as an openly gay person. I was closeted and very, very afraid that if I talked about being gay it would be the end of my career.”
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