The last 20 years have seen small (yet significant) global gains for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Now, a country that has been a vanguard for enshrining queer civil protections is poised to make its anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination laws a permanent fixture.
On Wednesday, the Dutch legislature advanced a measure to create a constitutional amendment ensuring equal protections on the basis of sexual orientation. The lower body of the nation’s legislative branch overwhelmingly passed the proposed amendment by a 124-26 margin.
Equal treatment is already a hallmark of the nation’s constitution, which begins in somewhat similar fashion as the United States’. Article 1 of the Dutch constitution mandates that citizens “be treated equally in equal circumstances,” which includes outlawing “discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race or sex” or on any other basis. The nation’s senate must approve the measure before it can be ratified into the Dutch constitution, and then it must be approved by the next parliament before it becomes law.
“Today we are taking a big step towards anchoring our rights in the constitution,” said Astrid Oosenbrug of the LGBTQ+ organization COC, in remarks to LGBTQ Nation. “That is important for today, as a task for politicians to tackle violence against LGBTI people, for example. And it is important for the future, as a guarantee that we can still enjoy our hard-won rights in fifty or a hundred years.”
According to Second Deputy Prime Minister Kajsa Ollongren, transgender and intersex people are already covered based on the current language in the constitution, because “sex” is inclusive of both groups, meaning that discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression is outlawed.
The Netherlands has long been ahead of the curve when it comes to civil rights for LGBTQ+ people. Same-sex marriage became legal in the country in December 2000 when the Dutch parliament passed a bill approving it by a roughly three-to-one margin. That’s a full 15 years prior to when it became legal across the entire United States by a landmark Supreme Court decision that came after a number of states incrementally made it legal within their jurisdictions.
The same bill that legalized same-sex marriage in the Netherlands also protected the right for same-sex couples to adopt children. As Pew Research notes, the legislation modified one sentence of an existing law on civil marriage, editing it to say that “a marriage can be contracted by two people of different or the same sex.”
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