Argentina may leapfrog Spain in gay rights legislation

argentina's got plenty of problems, for sure... for example, i had a long conversation last evening with a civil law attorney who in his "spare time," serves as the volunteer head of a non-profit traffic safety organization... (traffic safety, in argentina, is an oxymoron more akin, according to my friend, to barely controlled anarchy, with traffic rules and regulations virtually never enforced and, when they are, fines rarely collected... the national traffic fatality count is around 7000, a rate almost 7 times higher than the u.s. with less than a quarter as many vehicles on the road...) then there's the economic troubles, political troubles, etc... but, interestingly, among latin american countries, particularly catholic countries (which takes in damn near all of them), argentina is big on tolerance, live-and-let-live... this is coming up in september...

By drawing the media spotlight to five-year-old twins Lucas and Julia and their two "daddies", the Argentine gay and lesbian community is gearing up to fight for the passage of a bill in Congress that would not only legalise same-sex civil unions, but grant these couples the inheritance and adoption rights normally limited to marriage.

The bill will be introduced in the Argentine Congress in September. If it is passed into law, Argentina will become the first country in Latin America to legally recognise homosexual couples nationwide.

Same-sex civil unions are currently authorised in the city of Buenos Aires, but these partnerships do not include the right for one spouse to automatically inherit from the other, nor do they permit adopting children as a couple.

The civil union bill, which is backed by numerous jurists, is considered to be more progressive than the same-sex marriage law adopted in Spain last June. Instead of merely expanding the legal concept of marriage to include same-sex couples, the proposed legislation would establish a new, more open institution that some heterosexual couples may choose to opt for as well.

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