Same-sex marriage in Belgium 14 December and published on 23 December 1999 made the Act of statutory cohabitation go into effect on 1 January 2000. During 1999, the PS (French-speaking Social Democrats) and Ecolo (French-speaking Greens) also announced they agreed to legalise same-sex marriage. At that point, the only remaining party in Government that opposed same-sex marriage was the French-speaking liberal PRL (later merged into MR), mainly because it was opposed to adoption rights for same-sex couples. PRL agreed not to block same-sex marriage if adoption rights are excluded. As the first same-sex marriage in the Netherlands was performed on 1 April 2001, the
Same-sex marriage in Sweden said they would like a gender-neutral marriage law which states that marriage can be conducted solely by the state, as is done in several other countries, rather than the current system in which churches have the authority to (legally) marry people, because this would further the separation of church and state. Sweden also has a separate and more limited common-law marriage act for both unmarried and unregistered opposite-sex and same-sex couples. From 1988 to 2003, there were two different laws, one for opposite-sex couples and one for same-sex couples, which have since been united into a single law. Common-law marriage