Portugal’s parliament voted Friday to legalize marriages for gay and lesbian couples, but in a second vote denied gay and lesbian couples the right to adopt children.
“This law is one for all of us, a law which represents a victory for liberty, for justice, for equality and humanity,” Prime Minister Jose Socrates said in a passionate address prior to the vote, according to AFP.
He said that passage of the measure would help “redress the decades of injustice that have been perpetrated against homosexuals.” He noted that until 1982, “Portugal was in the absurd and revolting situation in which homosexuality was a crime punishable by law.”
He said LGBT people had suffered decades of discrimination in Catholic Portugal, which AFP notes has “traditionally been one of the most conservative countries in Europe.”
Despite that history, the bill has generated only muted opposition from the right, AFP reports.
Portugal’s parliament votes for marriage equality [contd.]
But a Catholic Socialist group did launch a petition campaign to force a referendum on the measure. The group claims to have gathered 91,000 signatures in just three weeks, but the petition did not make it through the process in time to stop today’s vote.
The bill was approved with the support of the governing Socialist Party and other parties further to the left, BBC reports.
Socrates, whose Socialist Party and its allied have a significant majority in parliament, resisted calls to put marriage equality to a public referendum, saying that the party’s manifesto for last September's election had included marriage equality as one of its planks.
“The mandate that we received from the Portuguese people concerned the issue of marriage between people of the same sex, nothing more and nothing less,” he said in today’s address to parliament.
But Socrates said that adoption was a different issue because “it does not just involve adults who are free to give their consent”.
A poll conducted late last year by Portugal’s Eurosondagem Institute found a strong majority (68.4 percent) of Portuguese opposed to adoption by same-sex couples, Portugal News Online reports. But they are more evenly divided when it comes to gay marriage with 49.5 percent against, with 45.5 percent in favor, according to the poll.
Paulo Corte-Real, head of a advocacy group Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual Intervention, said Thursday that it would be a “historic day” for Portgual if the bill goes through.
“It’s a milestone in the fight against discrimination,” he told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The proposed law must be reviews by a parliamentary commission before final approval, Portugal News Online reports.
It would then go to Portugal’s conservative President Anibal Cavaco Silva who can ratify or veto, Associated Press reports. But a veto could be overturned by the parliament. The margin of the vote wasn’t announced Friday morning, so it’s unclear if there were enough votes for an override.
If there is no presidential veto, the first marriage ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples could take place in April – a month before Pope Benedict XVI is due on an official visit to Portugal.
Portugal would become the eighth country to recognize marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples.