David Mills
By law, as they’re employees of the state (who begins tipping the whole thing into absurdity in the first place), Danish Lutheran pastors must marry anyone from their congregation who asks, but when in 2012 the state approve same-sex marriage, it gave pastors who objected an exemption, which it’s now taken away. Kind of.
It has, but it hasn’t, exactly, because, well let the very useful Scandinavia House explain:
The new law permits any person to change his legal gender by simply filing a form stating that he now considers himself of the opposite sex. This person is thereafter considered by the government to have changed gender. No surgical alterations or hormone treatments are required, only the filing of the form. . . .
The government’s Minister for Church Affairs, Marianne Jelved, has stated that if a person in a homosexual partnership files as being of the opposite gender and then wishes to marry the partner, this is now legally a heterosexual wedding. “The right to decline to perform homosexual weddings does not apply,” she stated. “Pastors must respect the civil authority’s determination.” Thus, in the opinion of the Minister, a Folkekirken pastor must perform the wedding in this situation. . . .
Eva Tøjner Götke, Vice President of Pastors’ Association, supports the new law. “We must be careful not to mix our moral vision into this,” she argues. “As a pastor, you have a duty to marry people who want to get married if they are of differing gender. This applies regardless of whether the gender difference is legal or biological.”
So the pastor has to marry a man to another man as long as one of them says he’s a woman, so he’s not marrying a man to a man so it’s all okay.
My thanks to William Tighe for the link.
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