COPENHAGEN, Denmark – In just a few months, gay couples will get the right to marry in the Church of Denmark – that is if the new church minister has his way.
The government plans to introduce a bill just after the New Year that will allow same-sex couples to hold weddings in the Church of Denmark and be ‘married’ under Danish law. Same-sex couples are currently allowed to have ‘registered partnerships’, a civil status, but are barred from marriage and church weddings.
“The first same-sex weddings will hopefully become reality in Spring 2012. I look forward to the moment the first homosexual couple steps out of the church. I’ll be standing out there throwing rice,” the new church minister, Manu Sareen, a Social Liberal, told Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
Sareen’s appointment as church minister was one of the more controversial of the new coalition government.
He is a professed religious “doubter”, who, before becoming church minister, came close to writing himself off the national church registry, in direct protest against its long-standing ban on same-sex marriage.
“I’m not sure that there’s a god, unfortunately,” Sareen told Jyllands-Posten. “I wish I could believe it. Then I could say: there’s God and because of him I know what happens after we die.”
But if the minister was uncertain about the existence of God, one thing he was absolutely certain of is that homosexuals deserve the same rights as heterosexuals.
“I have many friends who are homosexuals and can’t get married. They love their partners the same way heterosexuals do, but they don’t have the right to live it out in the same way. That’s really problematic,” Sareen said.
