The Netherlands, 1 April 2001: The First

The Dutch States-General passed the Act Opening Marriage to Persons of the Same Sex (Wet openstelling huwelijk) in December 2000, with the Tweede Kamer (lower house) approving it by a wide margin. The amendment rewrote Article 30 of Book 1 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek (Civil Code) so that it read, in operative part, that a marriage may be contracted by two persons of different sex or of the same sex. The change was formally confined to civil marriage; religious communities retained the right to decline to perform ceremonies, and the statute made explicit that no ecclesiastical consequence followed from the civil act.

The Eerste Kamer (Senate) confirmed the bill, and the Act entered into force on 1 April 2001 ↗, at which point four same-sex couples were married in Amsterdam in the first minutes after midnight by the then-Mayor Job Cohen. The Netherlands had already extended registered partnership to same-sex couples in 1998; the 2001 Act completed the move from parallel status to full legal equivalence.

Dutch civil registration data compiled by Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek) recorded approximately 2,500 same-sex marriages in the twelve months following the Act's entry into force. Male couples accounted for a larger share of those marriages in the opening period; female couples had disproportionately favoured registered partnership in the years before 2001. The numbers declined after the initial surge, settling into a lower but steady annual rate as the novelty effect dissipated — a pattern that would be observed in subsequent jurisdictions as each opened civil marriage.

No other country followed the Netherlands until Belgium enacted comparable legislation in 2003. The Dutch Act thus stood alone for more than two years, making it the singular reference point for every legal argument about marriage equality that followed elsewhere — in Europe, in the Americas, and ultimately before courts including the Supreme Court of the United States.