Germany legalises same-sex marriage

By THE DATA TEAM

“THINGS take longer to happen than you think they will,” the economist Rudiger Dornbusch once said, “and then they happen faster than you thought they could.” In the 16 years since Germany granted legal partnership rights to gay people, 13 European countries, including the Republic of Ireland, long a Catholic redoubt, began permitting homosexual couples to marry. But equal marriage rights never even came up for a debate in the German Bundestag until June 26th, when Angela Merkel, the country’s chancellor, publicly reversed her opposition to a free vote on same-sex marriage. The opposition grasped the chance and insisted on a snap vote. Once on the floor, a proposed amendment to existing legislation, allowing gays both to marry and to adopt children, sailed through the lower house on June 30th. Germany is now the 24th country in the world to authorise same-sex marriage.