Germany allows its first gay "marriages"

With the law just one day old, same-sex couples are flooding the wedding registry.

By Daryl Lindsey

Aug. 2, 2001 | BERLIN -- The district of Schvneberg, long the gay center of this city and once the romping ground of expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood, was ground zero yesterday for the first celebrations -- legal and in the streets -- of Germany's first legally recognized civil unions of same-sex couples.

Around 9 a.m., several dozen people gathered inside Schvneberg's City Hall -- where in 1963 President John F. Kennedy gave his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech -- to witness the union of theologian Gudrun Pannier and lawyer Angelika Baldow, the first lesbian couple to apply for a same-sex civil union in Berlin. Outside were an American-style media stakeout and a few demonstrators, most of whom protested that the new law, which permits "registered domestic partnerships," falls short of bestowing equal legal rights on same-sex unions.

Inside the City Hall, Pannier and Baldow, both 36, exchanged vows before family, friends and reporters. "We exchanged rings symbolically five years ago," says Pannier, "but this is the real thing."

And so, even as special-interest groups continue to lobby for the introduction of a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriages in the United States, Berlin is in the grip of gay wedding fever. Appointments at the city's wedding registry offices are already booked up through the first two weeks of August; so intense is the interest in gay marriage that employees at the office stopped counting the number of people calling for appointments after the number exceeded 250.

The Pannier and Baldow nuptials were the ceremonial apex for a city that has been reveling in all things gay for weeks now. In June, acting Mayor Klaus Wowereit of the ruling SPD Party (the Social Democrats) introduced a new phrase into the German lexicon by outing himself and announcing to the world: "I'm gay, and that's a good thing." Earlier this week, the Green Party threw a bash for Berlin's gays and lesbians to celebrate the civil union victory.

In a statement released Wednesday, Wowereit announced: "The [civil union] law doesn't fulfill everyone's needs, but it's a great step forward. It should cause something that was never abnormal to be recognized as normal everywhere in Germany." His sentiments were shared by Claudia Roth, leader of the Green Party, which was instrumental in pushing the law through the Bundestag. "Something in Germany had to change, and that's a good thing -- things will become more open, more tolerant, and [Germany] will become more European," she told reporters.

The Green Party's next move will be to introduce legislation meant to pave the way for same-sex couples to adopt children. But it's going to be an uphill battle. The Constitutional Court decision that legalized same-sex unions in Germany, and the legislation that followed, do not include provisions that would permit homosexuals to adopt. In a fashion similar to Vermont's "civil union" law, the registered partnership measure in Germany skirts the prickly issue of what might come after "marriage" in these newly legal unions.

Basically, the new civil union law offers gay and lesbian partners the right to sign up for health insurance with their spouses. It also offers same-sex couples the right to register their partnerships -- in most cases at the same registration offices where heterosexuals seek wedding applications. (The new law also requires that a couple seeking to dissolve the partnership must do so in court.) Finally, the law extends immigration rights to same-sex partners who are not German citizens.

But opponents say that like any compromise legislation, the German gay civil union law is flawed, granting gay couples fewer rights than those enjoyed by heterosexual couples. For example, gay couples will still lack many of the tax benefits bestowed on heterosexuals who marry.

Next page: Some German states are dragging their feet