Europe: England Decides in Favor of Homosexual “Marriage”, Poland Decides Against It

More than half of the 303 Tory deputies voted against the law or abstained, not following the choice of their party leader, “conservative” Prime Minister David Cameron.

During a televised declaration recorded before the vote, and republished by the newspaper Le Monde in its February 5, 2013, online edition, he renewed his support for this reform, claiming that it would make British society “stronger”:

I am a big supporter of marriage. It helps people commit mutually and I think that that is why homosexuals should be able to marry, too (...). It is a good step ahead for our country and I am proud that our government is taking it.

The bill now has to be approved by the House of Lords, before returning to the House of Commons at the beginning of the summer. It will apply to England and Wales, since Scotland and North Ireland legislate separately. On the religious level, this union will remain illegal for the Anglican Church but it will be a possibility for other religions, who will be free to celebrate it or not.

Across the Channel, homosexual couples could already “be united” in a civil partnership since 2005, and they have been able to adopt since 2002. They also have access to medically assisted procreation and to surrogate mothers, as long as these latter are not paid.

In Poland, the Diet, the lower house of Parliament, has rejected three bills aimed at introducing “a recorded partnership” for homosexual and heterosexual couples. Reunited in Warsaw on January 25, the members of Parliament cast a clear vote against the two leftist bills, while the bill of the Civic Platform Party, the party currently in power, was rejected by only 17 votes (228 to 211, with 10 abstentions). The first two texts, prepared by the anticlerical party Palikot and the social-democrat left-wing, were drafted on the French model of the PACS, while that of the Civic Platform Party proposed that a union between two persons of the same sex or of different sexes could be realized before a notary or a mayor. However, none of the bills proposed marriage, nor the adoption of children by homosexual couples.

Before the vote, the government was divided, for Minister of Justice Jaroslaw Gowin had judged the three bills “unconstitutional,” while Prime Minister Donald Tusk had declared that “we cannot close our eyes to an existing social reality.” The Catholic right-wing was clearly opposed to these bills that sought “to legalize the moral decadence of society,” as Artur Gorski, conservative deputy for the Right and Justice party, put it.

In Poland, where more than 90% of the inhabitants declare themselves Catholics, the Constitution declares that marriage is a union between a man and a woman.