Where in the World Is Same-Sex Marriage Legal?

It's not just those liberal Northern Europeans who have embraced homosexual unions.

BY URI FRIEDMAN | MAY 10, 2012

 

Country: Sweden

Year legalized: 2009

How it happened: Sweden -- one of the first countries to give gay couples legal "partnership" rights in the mid-1990s -- legalized same-sex marriage by a landslide parliamentary vote of 226 to 22 (a whopping 70 percent of Swedes polled before the passage of the new law supported gay marriage). Several months after the approval of the bill, the Lutheran Church of Sweden voted to allow gay weddings. Priests had a right to refuse to perform these ceremonies, but if they did the church would find another member of the clergy to officiate.

Jonas Ekstromer/AFP/Getty Images

 

Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.