On 28 November the Belgian Senate approved marriage between homosexual couples. The green and socialist senators voted in favour, while the liberals (VLD and MR) and the Flemish christian democrats (CD&V) were divided on the question. The Flemish extreme right (Vlaams Blok) and the French-speaking christian democrats (CDH) voted against it. According to the new law, homosexual couples enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples, with the exception of the right to adoption and filiation. To enter into force, the law must now await the approval of the Chamber of Deputies. The reaction of the Catholic Church to the law is negative: Bishop Arthur Luysterman of Ghent, in charge of juridical affairs in the Belgian Episcopal Conference, declined not to express a view on the new law, while the spokesman of the episcopate Toon Osaer recalled the document of the bishops ‘Choosing Marriage”, issued in October 1998, in which the Episcopal Conference had already expressed its disapproval of any legislation tending “to accord a juridical status equivalent to that of matrimony to other forms of cohabitation” and to “relativize marriage and the family”. In the view of Roger Burggraeve, professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of Louvain, the question whether this relationship should be called ‘matrimony’ is merely a semantic discussion. In actual fact, the real crux of the question “is that of filiation: in this field there will always be, de facto, an essential difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples. The fact that marriage is intimately connected with procreation gives it a different status. For the child it’s not only a question of growing up in an environment in which he/she feels loved: the biological bond with his/her parents is also a constitutive fact”.
