In 2001, Volker Beck, a homosexual member of the German Parliament and member of The Greens, drafted a bill which would allow homosexual couples to join together in civil union. Since 1949, marriage and family has been "under protection of the state" under Article 6 of the German Constitution (Jones, 221). While the article did not use gender explicit language, heterosexual relationships were the only generally-accepted validations of the law. Thus, marriage as a heteronormative institution was created in Germany. Beck's 2001 law, called the Lebenspartnerschaftsgesetz (LPartG), was signed by German President Johannes Rau on February 16, 2001 and enacted into law on August 11, 2001. The law, however, only added the words "life partner" and "life partnership" beside the word "marriage" in the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (Jones, 223), essentially making it a completely different entity from marriage.
The law did not treat homosexuals as couples, rather as individuals. Therefore, issues were raised over the amount of which these couples were taxed. Due to their status as individuals, homosexual couples fell into the tax bracket III, rather than the tax bracket I that their heterosexual counterparts fell into (Birk & Wernsmann, 2001). They therefore paid higher taxes, meaning inequality still existed between heterosexual and homosexual couples. In 2004, the government amended the LPartG in the Gesetz zur Überarbeitung des Lebenspartnerschaftsrechts, with the new law coming into effect on January 1, 2005. The amendment made step-child adoption and divorce possible for homosexual couples, but it did not give them equal tax benefits. On June 6, 2013, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that homosexual couples should have the same tax benefits as heterosexual couples. This ruling came more than twelve years after civil unions were established in Germany. |
In 2011, Census data concluded that there were a total of 68,268 people living in Registered Partnerships (Civil Unions) in Germany.
Source: www.zensus2011.de/SharedDocs/AktuellesEN/Press_release_of_the_federal_statistical_office_2014_04.html?nn=3068736 |