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  ... The Swedes do it!

  Posted Wednesday, April 01, 2009 12:08 PM | By E.J. Graff

  And an update to my earlier post on Vermont teetering on the brink of opening the m-word to same-sex pairs: The Swedes have just done it. Sweden has had an all-but-marriage regime much like civil unions, called registered partnerships, for about 15 years. Today the country passed a law gender-neutralizing marriage entirely, 261-22, joining the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, and Norway in going all the way—beyond partial recognition to full equality.

  Watch for the rest of Scandinavia next. Which may or may not include Vermont.
  

   

  
   

  Filed under: marriage, LGBT rights, same-sex marriage, civil unions

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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