The first Scandinavian country to open marriage to all
"We have worked so long for this": on 17 June 2008, Norway's parliament voted for marriage equality.
On 17 June 2008, the Lagting, the upper division of the Norwegian parliament, voted by 23 to 17 for a gender-neutral marriage law. Norway thus became the first Scandinavian country and the sixth in the world to allow same-sex couples full marriage, after the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada and South Africa.
The road to this milestone was long. As early as 1993, Norway had become the second country in the world after Denmark to introduce registered partnerships, which gave same-sex couples almost the same rights as married couples but excluded adoption and church weddings. Now, fifteen years later, the new law removed these last differences. The marriage law was simply worded in gender-neutral terms: instead of "man and woman", the text now read "two persons".
The Odelsting had already approved the law on 11 June by 84 votes to 41. The driving force was the red-green coalition government under Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, supported by two opposition parties. Those voting against were mainly the Progress Party and the Christian Democrats, who feared a weakening of the institution of marriage. When the result of the vote in the Lagting was announced, cheers broke out in the public gallery, according to media reports. Jon Reidar Øyan, head of the Norwegian National Association for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, said: "I didn't dare celebrate until I heard the chairman's gavel."
The law came into force on 1 January 2009. Since then, lesbian and gay couples in Norway have had the same right to church weddings, joint adoption and artificial insemination as heterosexual couples. That a traditionally Lutheran country, of all places, became the sixth in the world to take this step underlined how far Scandinavia had pulled away from other regions of the world on questions of queer equality.