Northern Ireland becomes last part of UK to gain marriage equality
Image: Northern Ireland has become the final part of the United Kingdom and the British Isles to allow same-sex marriage. Photo: Robert Paul Young.
Northern Ireland has finally allowed marriage equality to pass into law after conservative MPs were unable to convince enough other parties to help them beat a midnight deadline to block the reform on Monday night.
Northern Ireland has its own parliament but its governing coalition collapsed after elections in March of 2017 and so it has failed to have a functioning administration since then.
31 Democratic Unionist MPs tried to reconvene the Northern Ireland Assembly in order to block the reform but Sinn Fein and most of the other parties in the assembly refused to cooperate with them.
That allowed a law passed by the British Parliament to come into effect, creating marriage equality in this final piece of the British Isles.
The same law also decriminalised abortion in Northern Ireland.
According to the BBC, the first same-sex weddings in Northern Ireland will begin in February of 2020.
100% well done Northern Ireland on finally passing both abortion and gay marriage laws, how does it feel to be part of the 21st century now hey! We Libertarian individuals supported and advocated these issues way back in the 1970s – what took you so bloody long hey? But then again it took an independent MP and gay man Alex Greenwich to introduce a bill to legalise abortion within NSW, Australia too. Personally I do not agree to any government or religious run marriages – because it is an outdated patriarchal institution not fit for the 21st century and who gets married today seriously, but if two people what to have life, liberty and happiness who am I to judge hey! As for abortion it is simple – her body, her choice, her right!