Karlsruhe upholds the "little gay marriage"
In 2002, three CDU/CSU-led states took "gay marriage" to court and lost. A quiet, groundbreaking victory.
On 17 July 2002, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe delivered a ruling that became a milestone for same-sex couples in Germany: the newly introduced Civil Partnership Act was compatible with the Basic Law.
The background was a gruelling power struggle. On 1 August 2001, the "Act to End Discrimination against Same-Sex Communities" had come into force. For the first time, female and male couples could give their relationship a legal framework, with a shared name, mutual maintenance obligations and first inheritance rights. The "little gay marriage" was still a long way from equality with marriage, but even this step provoked determined resistance.
The CDU/CSU-led states of Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia took the matter to Germany's highest court. Their application for judicial review relied on the special protection of marriage and the family in Article 6 of the Basic Law. From it they derived a "requirement of distance": no other form of life could be allowed to come too close to marriage. The new institution was therefore unconstitutional.
The First Senate rejected this view. The protection of marriage, the court said, did not prevent the legislature from providing same-sex partnerships with rights and obligations equal or close to those of marriage. There was no constitutional requirement to treat other forms of partnership less favourably merely in order to privilege marriage. The core sentence of the ruling: marriage was neither harmed nor otherwise impaired by the law.
This settled that partnerships already registered would stand and that more couples could follow. The ruling laid the legal foundation for everything that came after: gradual alignment in adoption, tax and inheritance law through later Karlsruhe decisions, and ultimately the opening of marriage in 2017. A quiet but decisive victory before the Constitutional Court.