Frans Timmermans, Dutch diplomat and vice president of the European Union’s executive-branch “European Commission,” is calling for the legalization of homosexual marriages throughout all of Europe. According to the Telegraph, he has joined his voice to those of campaigners seeking to consecrate same-sex marriages under the EU’s freedom of movement rules, stating that it is a “disgrace” that any European country should not recognize the untraditional union formed elsewhere in the EU.
Freedom of movement, a core principle of the EU argue campaigners in Brussels, is undermined if homosexual couples cannot relocate and expect the recognition of their marriage. Under such a situation a same-sex couple married in Britain could maintain shared legal rights on property, pensions, and access to children if they moved to Italy, for example, where such unions are as of yet not recognized.
Same-sex marriages are currently recognized in 8 of the 28 EU states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, and Finland will follow suit beginning in 2017. Moreover, civil partnerships which grant legal recognition of homosexual marriages are recognized in all states except Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
At last week’s Equality Gala in Brussels Timmermans lamented the legal problems faced by mobile gay couples, calling them “idiotic.” He proposed that all member states of the EU ought to at least have the “decency” to respect the decisions of other countries. Ironically, this does not include the decency to respect the decisions of countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria to constitutionally define marriage in its traditional sense as being between one man and one woman.
