Ten years of equality in Spain (10 años de igualdad en españa)

America should be very proud. #LoveWins pic.twitter.com/qH1OA1BV2j

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 27, 2015

There’s been a lot of excitement this past week to do with the US Supreme Court’s finding in favour of marriage equality in that country. And quite rightly too, as the finding means that the West’s most influential country has made same-sex marriage legal across the length and breadth of its land. It is a big deal.

But let’s not forget that 37 states of the Union already enjoyed marriage equality and, more importantly, the United States is country number 21 to legalise same-sex marriage.

My adopted home, Spain, celebrated 10 years of marriage equality this week. During this past decade 31,610 same-sex couples have married here (and I’m proud to say that G and I are included in that statistic).

The voting board in Spain's congreso (Parliament) showing the historic win for marriage equality on June 30, 2005

And Spain wasn’t even the first county to embrace marriage equality: Holland (in 2001) and Belgium (in 2003) beat it to it and Canada was pipped to the 4^th position by Spain by just a few days.

Of course with America’s decision the sad-old predictions have been trotted out: the erosion of family values, the devaluation of the institution of marriage, the "slippery slope" towards state-sanctioned incest, bestiality or polygamy – the latter, embarrassingly, was just repeated by a senior member of my own Australia’s government. 

But let’s be serious for a moment. Have any of these things actually happened in the 14 years since marriage equality has been a fact in our world? Of course not.

In Spain, the 31-odd thousand same sex marriages that have been performed in the last decade, in my eyes, can only strengthen marriage as an institution - that's 62-odd thousand extra people embracing marriage who never would have had the opportunity without marriage equality.

Recent polls here suggest that between 68 and a whopping 85 percent of Spaniards are in agreement with the right to marry having been extended to same-sex couples. It was around 58% ten years ago when the law was introduced.

Perhaps even more telling is that almost 60% of conservative voters, whose political party of choice voted against marriage equality and even took the law to the Constitutional Court (Spain’s version of the US’s Supreme Court) – and lost – now support marriage equality.

I would imagine that if the institution of marriage had been damaged here over the past decade, these numbers would not be nearly so positive.

With my own marriage, not once in the whole process – from filing the paperwork and picking up our marriage licence in the registro civil (Births, Deaths and Marriages) to the wonderful service in the ajuntamiento (town hall) - were G and I made to feel by anyone that this was somehow an inappropriate or unusual thing that we were doing. At our little reception afterwards, other diners at the restaurant went out of their way to come over and congratulate us.

Oh, and just to be clear, Spaniards are still not allowed (and not asking) to marry their brothers and sisters, dogs, cats, ferrets or more than one person at a time either.

So on this 10^th anniversary of marriage equality in my adopted home I want to raise a glass to Spain, the USA and to the 19 other nations of the Earth that have embraced equality and, sadly, waggle my index finger at my birth country who, in the face of an unstoppable tide, seems determined to hold out for as long as it possibly, petulantly can (despite the wishes of its own people).

Here's a little snippet from (rather fittingly) the movie version of Hairspray, that sums up quite nicely where I think we are today...

Getting married (Nos casamos)...

This is the business end of what could best be described in English as a marriage licence - our marriage licence. Yes, we’re getting married.

It’s all very exciting, but it’s been quite a process that has taken the better part of two years and challenged patience and sanity along the way – and we’re not married yet.

The reasons for this are varied. Some have to do with this being a same-sex marriage - although that's not an issue at all here in Spain - but mostly it comes down to the particularities of our situation and the mountains of bureaucracy that you have to swim through to do just about anything in Europe.

To tell this tale correctly, I’ll start at the beginning.

I’d been bugging G for some time about the old marriage thing. He’d always been pretty lukewarm on the whole idea. Then a few New Year’s back we went to Stockholm.

One of the must-sees on any visit to that lovely city is the wonderful, somewhat architecturally-schizophrenic Stockholm City Hall. On a tour of the place, we entered a beautiful room that the guide explained was the wedding room, where anyone, “girls and boys, girls and girls or boys and boys from just about anywhere” could make their vows. That got G thinking.

A couple of months later he forwarded an EMAIL to me from the Stockholm City Hall confirming our wedding booking there. That was his proposal. Needless to say I didn’t respond. 

Getting all the paperwork together was a little daunting. We needed birth certificates, no impediment to marriage certificates, civil status certificate for G, divorce certificate for me and they had to come from all over the world: Italy, Australia, even Canada.

The bonus though was that this paper trail was a LOT less intensive than if we were doing the deed in Spain (I’d quietly done some research on getting married in Spain some time before – as I said, I had been keen on the idea for some time).

We managed to get everything together and then it all fell spectacularly apart. You see Sweden, as progressive as it might be, is a real stickler for the rules and we had run into a snag – well two snags. This is where the same-sex issue came into play.

Firstly, Italy would not provide a no-impediment to marriage certificate for G as same-sex marriage is expressly forbidden in their Constitution (thanks to Mr Berlusconi). Instead they gave him another document, saying it would be accepted. It wasn’t.

Secondly, Australia, who actually were brilliant despite not having marriage equality either, had removed the line from my no impediment to marriage certificate that stated “in Australia marriage is a union between a man and a women”, or something to that effect, in an attempt to not cause confusion for a same-sex union. Unfortunately, for Sweden, removing that line made the certificate inadmissible.

And that was that. Guttered. And just a little bit disillusioned too. But at least Sweden had got G around to the idea of marriage, and I wasn’t going to let that go. We’d do it at home in Spain.

As I said before, the paper trail for getting married in Spain is much more involved than in Sweden. The good news, though, was that the Spanish had sorted out the technical hurdles that had snookered us up north.

In case any extanjeros reading this are thinking of getting married in Spain, here’s a bit of a run-down of what needed to be organised (based on our experience of course):

1. Birth certificates, for some unknown reason, cannot be more than one year old at the time of filing. That meant new documents for both of us.
2. No impediment to marriage certificates, or their equivalent (in the case of G) cannot be more than six months old at the time of filing.
3. In case of divorce the original marriage certificate is also needed (again for some unknown reason) as well as divorce certificate.
4. All documents from countries that are signatories to the Hague Convention (Italy and Australia are) need to be authorised with the Hague Convention Apostle (stamp), which can only be done in the country of origin.
5. Any documents from countries that are not signatories (like Canada in the case of my divorce certificate) have to be returned to that country for authentication by both that county’s Dept of Foreign Affairs and the Spanish Consul General there.
6. All foreign documents have to be translated into Spanish by an official, government-registered translator (Sweden accepted all languages).
7. Certificates of empadronamiento – in Spain you have to register your address with the local town hall. – going back two years, but not more than 3 months old at time of filing (work that one out). I still haven't been able to work out what would happen if one of the parties was not a resident.
8. Passport and/or identity cards.

Needless to say all of this took some coordinating. And it was not helped by the fact that the information on the government website was not actually correct! We found this out when we had collated all the documentation and went to present it at the Registro Civil (Births, Deaths & Marriages) and they told us, completely straight-faced: "Oh no, you can't trust what's on the website".

But after some to-ing and fro-ing (and the re-issue of some documents that had expired according to their guidelines) we got there in the end. And I have to say, although getting married in Sweden would have been fun and a bit exotic, I’m rather happy that we’re doing it in the country that has been our home for all these years.  

Not to mention that the delay means that we’re getting married in the year in which we’ll celebrate our 10^th year together - and that’s rather romantic actually.

A little bit about Marriage Equality in Spain

This July marks the 10^th year that Spain has had marriage equality - and society hasn’t fallen apart yet, despite what is being argued in some other countries. In fact, very few people seem to give two hoots about it here.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been challenges. The party that is now in government took the law to the Constitutional Court when it was introduced, obviously back when they were in opposition. Just a year or so ago (yes it took that long for the case to be heard) the Court threw the challenge out, saying there was nothing unconstitutional about it at all.

The ruling still didn’t stop the zealously Catholic Interior Minister say he didn’t care what the Court said, same-sex marriage was not marriage, as far as he was concerned for these reasons. I thought that was a very inappropriate thing for a senior government minister to say about a ruling from the highest court in the land. 

But hey, his blinkered opinion won't change the law. And despite the very conservative nature of the government he is a part of, barring a cataclysm, marriage equality is here to stay in Spain. There is just no appetite for change amongst the vast majority of the electorate.

Which makes me wonder: if a predominately Catholic country like Spain, still in love with so many of it’s Catholic traditions and rituals, can live so well with marriage equality, what is stopping other countries, like my own Australia, from embracing it?