Love won in Montenegro after a lesbian couple became the first in the European country’s history to tie the knot.
The ceremony took place on Sunday in Budva, a coastal resort town along the Adriatic sea, according to the local news website Balkan Insight. Little is known about the identities of the brides, who have chosen not to be publicly identified, except that they were born in Montenegro but live and work abroad.
This weekend’s milestone took place one year after the Parliament of Montenegro passed a bill extending equal marriage rights to same-sex couples in the small, culturally conservative country of 622,000 people, with some notable exceptions. While same-sex couples are now permitted hospital visitation rights and social security benefits already afforded to married opposite-sex partners, they will still be barred from adopting or fostering children.
The marriage legislation was highly contentious, passing with just a two-vote majority. Many lawmakers boycotted the vote, with one vocal critic claiming that marriage equality was being perpetrated by “world Satanists,” according to the LGBTQ+ newspaper Bay Area Reporter.
There were additional concerns that the law, which didn’t take effect until July 15, 2021, wouldn’t be fully enforced by Montenegro’s government. The ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, which spearheaded its passage, was voted out in the 2020 elections, marking the first time in three decades that President Zdravko Krivokapic’s party does not control the legislature, according to Balkan Insight.
The new ruling bloc led by the right-wing, populist Democratic Front opposed equal marriage, as the news site Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty further reports.
Prior to the narrow success of the 2020 bill, Montenegro tried and failed to enact an equal marriage law on two separate occasions: 2014 and 2019. Its long-awaited passage makes the Balkan country the third in the region to extend relationship recognition to same-sex couples after Croatia and Slovenia, both of which are members of the European Union. Montenegro is the first non-EU nation to do so.
Advocacy groups celebrated the watershed moment for equality, which follows the enactment of an LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination law in 2010.
“We congratulate to the two partners from the bottom of our hearts and we wish them a happy life together, hoping that this will encourage other same-sex couples in Montenegro to implement their right guaranteed by law!” the local community group LGBT Forum Progres tweeted on Sunday. “We are particularly proud of the fact that the first partnership was registered in Budva, exactly 8 years after the first historic pride parade took place in this town.”
But despite this achievement, LGBTQ+ people in Montenegro will continue to face extreme challenges in a country where nearly three-fourths of residents are Eastern Orthodox Christians. A 2010 survey conducted by the Danish Institute for Human Rights found that 71% of respondents view homosexuality to be an “illness,” and around half claimed that same-sex relationships are “very dangerous for society” and said that “state institutions should work to suppress it.”
Other surveys have found that support for LGBTQ+ rights has actually decreased in the past decade. A 2019 study from The Williams Institute found that Montenegrans were less likely to support equality in 2017 than 14 years prior, and the University of California, Los Angeles think tank ranked the country below Yemen and Libya on LGBTQ+ acceptance.
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