Greek PM faces fierce opposition over pledge to legalise gay marriage
The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, appears to be facing one of his most daunting challenges yet after a pledge to legalise same-sex marriage ignited fierce debate in the Orthodox Christian country.
Throwing his weight behind an issue still prone to provoke extraordinary emotion, not least among his own MPs, Mitsotakis acknowledged he would have to use his skills of persuasion to push through the reform as opposition mounted within his centre-right New Democracy party.
“I, and all those who believe in this legislation, must convince our parliamentarians and subsequently those who may still have a negative stance,” he said in his first interview of the year with the country’s public broadcaster ERT. “What we are going to legislate is equality in marriage, which means the elimination of any discrimination based on sexual orientation. It is not something radically different from what applies in other European countries.”
The leader’s intervention, six months after securing a second term in office with a landslide victory “to reform the country” underscores just how sensitive the issue of gay rights remains in Greece. In a society regarded as one of Europe’s most socially conservative, Mitsotakis, who belongs to New Democracy’s moderate faction, not only faces the disapproval of his own deputies, but stiff resistance from the state’s powerful Orthodox church. Clerics have repeatedly warned that approval of same-sex marriage would be a first step towards the LGBTQ+ community assuming parental rights, going so far as to suggest it would lead to the dismantlement of Greek society.
“Children are neither pets nor accessories,” its governing body, the Holy Synod, said in a recent circular distributed to dioceses. “No social modernisation and no political correctness can trick the natural need of children for a father and a mother.” The Metropolitan of Piraeus, Seraphim, who had previously threatened to excommunicate lawmakers if they voted in favour of legalising same-sex unions, went further, calling homosexuality “an abuse of the body” and a “great sin”.
On Thursday the front pages of Estia and Dimokratia, two rightwing dailies, opined that the proposed law could threaten the government’s parliamentary majority and even prove to be Mitsotakis’ “Waterloo”.
But the prime minister, who said he had not only “read up and studied” the topic but given it a lot of thought, said Greece would not be legitimising surrogate parenthood.
“We won’t change the law on assisted parenthood,” he said, addressing the issue for the first time publicly on Wednesday evening. He emphasised that same-sex couples just like straight people could continue to adopt children.
“The idea of women who are turned into child-producing machines on demand … that is not going to happen. We will not experiment with more advanced ideas.”
Weighing into the debate with its own proposed legislation earlier this week, the main opposition leftist Syriza party, which is led by Greece’s first openly gay party leader, Stefanos Kasselakis, insisted that surrogacy should be considered an innate parental right.
Kasselakis, who assumed the helm of the party in September, made a point of marrying his longtime American partner, Tyler Mcbeth, in the US in October. Within weeks of his unexpected election to the party leadership, the former banker spoke of the couple’s desire to have children through surrogacy. “These are issues solved in other countries, but not in Greece,” the Greek American wrote on Facebook. “That’s why I entered politics. To stir stagnant waters, to awaken consciences, not to caress them in their sleep.”
Mitsotakis, who also faces opposition from leading cabinet ministers, said he had been moved to address the issue mainly because the children of gay people weren’t recognised under Greek law.
“There are children. I don’t think anyone doubts this reality: that homosexual couples have children and these children are not going to stop existing, they are not going to vanish. But these children do not have equal rights,” he said, highlighting the example of a non-biological mother in a lesbian relationship having no legal access to the couple’s child in the event of her partner falling ill. “She has no rights. The child will go to an institution … A child born abroad cannot become a Greek citizen because, very simply, we don’t recognise [same-sex] marriage in Greece.”
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Ahead of EU elections in June, Mitsotakis is keen to shore up support from centrists upset by the government’s tough stance on immigration and suspected wiretapping of political opponents.
Instituting same-sex marriage would, he intimated, take the wind out of the sails of the leftwing opposition who had failed to adopt the measure during the four years Syriza was in power between 2015 and 2019. If passed, the law would see same-sex wedding ceremonies being conducted as civil marriages and not as religious affairs.
“Big reforms in family law have always come from the centre-left with the centre-right usually being behind developments,” added Mitsotakis, the first leader to appoint a gay man to a ministerial post when his party won office almost five years ago.
“I can still remember New Democracy voting down revolutionary changes in family law in 1982, changes such as decriminalising adultery that now seem absolutely obvious.”
But Mitsotakis also accepted that the debate around same-sex marriage needed time “to mature” and he evaded the question as to when the legislation would be put to parliament. Currently less than 100 of his party’s 158 MPs are likely to back the bill. An opinion poll conducted this week by the Greek polling company Alco, for the private TV station Alpha, showed 49% of respondents opposing the legalisation of same-sex marriage, with 35% in favour.
“We will listen to the views of the church,” he said, noting that clerics had also been virulently opposed to civil marriages and cremation before both had been legalised. “I don’t know if we will be able to agree … but it is the state that legislates, it doesn’t co-legislate with the church.”