Iceland: Best Country (9th nation with same sex marriage)
polycounter lvl 19
In a unanimous decision, all 49 parliament members voted to amend the marriage contract to be gender neutral today at noon.
Iceland owns once again. There was already a same sex partnership with all the same rights, but it carried a separate name and was under a separate legal entry in the laws. now all marriage contracts will be gender neutral with Person A and Person B. Iceland joins the ranks of the other 8 countries with same sex marriage:
Belgium
Canada
Iceland
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Iceland is also the first country to have elected a female president (back in 1980!), and the first country to elect an openly gay (lesbian) and married prime minister who is currently serving. Iceland also has the highest percentage of equality with females in job positions alongside men (it's close to 50/50), but still has a problem with pay equality.
http://visir.is/ein-hjuskaparlog-fyrir-alla/article/2010367989645
(my translation of the article to English)
One Marriage-law for all
Parliament today approved a law on one marriage-law. Regarding an amendments to existing legislation about gay marriage. The same law will therefore apply to both heterosexual as homosexual, which can let them get married together in congregations and stewards. The bill presented by the human rights minister was approved unanimously by 49 votes.
Numerous members explained their votes, saying that most of the major steps were involved. "I say yes with the sun in the heart. I think Iceland and the world be better than yesterday, "said Margaret Tryggvad
Iceland owns once again. There was already a same sex partnership with all the same rights, but it carried a separate name and was under a separate legal entry in the laws. now all marriage contracts will be gender neutral with Person A and Person B. Iceland joins the ranks of the other 8 countries with same sex marriage:
Belgium
Canada
Iceland
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Iceland is also the first country to have elected a female president (back in 1980!), and the first country to elect an openly gay (lesbian) and married prime minister who is currently serving. Iceland also has the highest percentage of equality with females in job positions alongside men (it's close to 50/50), but still has a problem with pay equality.
http://visir.is/ein-hjuskaparlog-fyrir-alla/article/2010367989645
(my translation of the article to English)
One Marriage-law for all
Parliament today approved a law on one marriage-law. Regarding an amendments to existing legislation about gay marriage. The same law will therefore apply to both heterosexual as homosexual, which can let them get married together in congregations and stewards. The bill presented by the human rights minister was approved unanimously by 49 votes.
Numerous members explained their votes, saying that most of the major steps were involved. "I say yes with the sun in the heart. I think Iceland and the world be better than yesterday, "said Margaret Tryggvad
Replies
Sounds like Awesomesauce.
Germany has 'lebenspartnershaft' but it´s missing things like mutual adoption of an unrelated child (you can mutually adopt a kid that is biologically one of yours) and no tax breaks like straight marriages. There are many countries with some kind of partnership, but these are the only 9 with the same legal entity for both.
aayah feeyatla yo kutl
Isnt Iceland bankrupt and sitting below a few feet of ash? This looks like a ploy to convince young rich gay men to visit their country and "stimulate" the economy.
Unemployment is still 2/3 what it is in the US.
Maybe they triggered the vulcano themselves to get the tourism biz
rolling!
I lol'd!
On a related note, something I find very weird here in the UK is that the Civil Partnership is only applicable to same-sex relationships! You can't get one if you're in a heterosexual relationship! That doesn't make any sense...
When did this forum turn into a my country is best thing though? Anyway.. good for you
"buy one of icelands brand new Eyjafjallajökulls and no enemy aircraft will enter your airspace ever again.. !! Buy two and your neighboring countries airspace is empty too"
Yep. Gonna be interesting. I couldn't vote, but all my friends voted for him. To be honest, with how worthless most politicians are, I'm willing to give a comedian a shot.
This is completely untrue. The Icelandic government and people have done nothing but say how they will pay it back. What they refuse to do is pay it back in such a way that the entire country is driven into poverty, which is what the UK and Netherlands tried to do with the initial agreement. Right now a new deal is being worked on between all 3 governments and seems close to completion, at which point it will be payed back.
It's especially ironic that the UK is so upset about it when they had the same problem with Northern Rock and also refused to pay, but there wasn't a bigger country that could bully them into doing it anyway.
cool shit guys, congrats. Hopefully america will at least sort out some kind of nationwide, gender neutral civil union system someday soon.
Almost! Add in the tax changes and next of kin stuff and we'd be in business.
I know it varies from state to state, but are common-law marriages in the States generally eligible for that kind of stuff? Just curious.
*thumbs up for that silly little country*
(now giev our monies back!!!)
That's because Iceland's population is like 1/60th of the United States...
If we had less people, we'd hardly have any unemployment. (go go population control!)
Hopefully the US will come to it's senses and fully legalize same sex marriage though. In a land of the "free", you would think people could do as they wish.
Lol, someone doesn't know how statistics work. It's a percentage of the total population, which makes it appropriate to compare. If it were raw numbers, with only 1/1000 the population total, Iceland would have like 1/5,000,000 the unemployment of the US, since there are more unemployed in each state than there are people total in Iceland.
Which puts into perspective any laws that they pass, its equivalent to passing a *city ordinance* in a lot of us cities.
No, the volcano did not create a lot of jobs. Very little cleanup was needed, and lots of volunteers went for most of it. Now there is a lake of water in the crater, and if that leaks out, it will potentially flood a town that would need some rebuilding, but that hasn't happened yet.
Someone mentioned financial problems, and I was trying to give a yard stick that most people could relate to. Unemployment using U-6 is below 10% whereas using the same method in the US (which is the method the majority of the world uses) is over 15%. So whatever that means to you, Iceland is having a hard time, but it's not a mad max meltdown.
For instance the official numbers here say we went from 4.6% in 2007, to 9.5% where we currently are, so a little less than double.
Oh here i found it myself, 2007 iceland unemployment was 1.3%, currently it is 8.2%. Not only is that nowhere near 1/3rd of US unemployment, but that is a HUGE jump. In any relative comparison, iceland lost a fuck-ton more jobs than the US.
http://www.indexmundi.com/iceland/unemployment_rate.html
http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/unemployment_rate.html
Edit: Do you have more info on this U6 stuff? I'm having trouble actually finding this rate for iceland.
2007 the U6 unemployment rate in the US was about 8.5, today its about 16.5, again the increase is about double, which is consistent with the "regular" unemployment rate. Even in the 90's when we had a supposedly VERY GOOD economy, our u6 rate was 8-10, so its not like we're seeing a 400% increase here, which is the case in Iceland in the only data i can find.
Here: it's at 16.6% in the US right now using U-6: http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
Keep in mind this does NOT count imprisoned people, and with the US having 750 per 100,000 people in jail, vs Iceland's 45 per 100k, that skews it a lot as well.
Just to boil it down, 8.2 even less than 2/3 than 16.6, it's actually half.
So using percentage of population, Iceland has half the unemployed percentage of the US, and those people who are unemployed here have access to unemployment benefits that do not run out, housing, and healthcare, all things the unemployed in the US do not.
I mean, if your point is that our financial crisis was worse IN RELATION to our standing in 2007, sure, I agree, but overall suffering and people who are jobless and with no support, is still very much lower in the US, by a factor of 2 or more. So if you're trying to figure out if Iceland is a financial wasteland of starving zombies, here is the metric to gauge our crisis vs the US. It's bad compared to 2007, but still less than half what the US is facing.
Its useless to discuss this in anything but relative terms, the US has a much more diverse and complex labor market, being that it literally has 100 times the population. You can make an argument that pre-2007 the us was in pretty bad shape, but if you look at the numbers, back in the mid-90s when we were doing pretty good, unemployment wasn't much different. So, the argument doesnt hold much water.
For fun lets take another very small sample, Minneapolis, being roughly the same size as iceland.
2007 U6: 9%
2010 U6: 13.5%
Iceland U6
2007 U6: 1.3%
2010:U6: 8.6%
It would be foolish to say Iceland has had anything other than a colossus failure in its economic system, and massive rises in unemployment, compared to ANY country or region in the world.
So odd, it's almost like comparing in size doesn't matter and really shows where the priority differences lie.
Iceland and the US both have SERIOUS problems. I think its pretty safe to say that the size of country the US is, and the massive amount of diversity make our problems much harder to deal with. I'm not saying we dont have problems, or that our problems aren't terrible, its just foolish to say "be like iceland, flip the switch and turn ur country into the greatest".
No one was saying that. Someone opined that Iceland might be having a financial apocalypse. That is not the case. It is bad "for us" but we already started very well off, and even our big dip doesn't put us near as bad in percentage as the US (for unemployment). So if you're American, and that's the system you know, we're half the unemployment using the same statistics.