François Brutsch, who normally writes at his interesting French language blog Un Swissroll, has a guest post up on Normblog discussing the fact that on Sunday the Swiss, a rich and highly educated but undoubtedly conservative people, are going to give popular assent to a law granting gay and lesbian couples rights similar to marriage for heterosexual couples.
I found this section of his post particularly interesting:
Of course the Catholic church, virtually alone, is still against this law. But we avoided the sort of heated division between fundamentalisms that is blighting the American debate: nothing less than a redefinition of marriage to include gays and lesbians, as advocated by Andrew Sullivan, on one side; nothing else than heterosexual couples, on the other side.
That is surely the reason why the UK was so untouched by heated discussions about civil partnerships and so the legislation passed with barely a whimper of opposition.
There is no decent argument against homosexual couples having the same basic rights as hetrosexuals but at the same time I can’t quite fathom why some gay activists wish to fight a battle over marriage and in particular why they would want to try and convince religious organisations to accept their attempt at redefinition.
The tactic seems to have caused all manner of problems in the States that European gays haven’t had to worry about it.
