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No one has to marry. But we all must have the right
to chose that for ourselves’ OSLO,
13/08/2010 (Texto, fotos y video © LIOWLB / AVS / Enkidu Magazine): Ayer, día
del cumpleaños de Agustín, en punto de las 10 de la madrugada acudimos a una
de las organizaciones de la diversidad-sexo-genérica más importantes de
Noruega: LLH – Landsforeningen for
lesbisk og homofil frigjøring (Norwegian lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender organization), cuya Presidenta, Karen Pinholt, estaba a punto de
terminar la conversación cuando surgió un tema que teníamos que abordar: Karen
Pinholt, Presidenta LLH: One of the issues we have discussed in Norway is ‘Do
we want to marry?’ isn’t that just the gay community adopting the
heterosexual way and accepting that that is the way things should be?’ And I
say ‘No, we don’t have to marry. No one has to marry. But we all must have
the right to chose that for ourselves’. That is
why the right to marry is important, because every gay person who does not
want to marry should have to make that decision themselves; should have the
possibility to reject marriage by themselves and not have that rejection put
on them. They shouldn’t be told by the State ‘You should not marry’; they
should make that ‘this is my life, I decide that I will not marry’. Just as
many heterosexuals have that right, to choose not to marry or to choose to
marry. So, even
for the people that think we should not marry or who don’t think that
marriage is right for them. I believe that even for them the marriage issue
can be important, because that puts that decision in their own hands as opposed
to in some politicians or some priest or whoever else that decides that we
should not get married. Agustin
Villalpando, Enkidu Magazine: The domestic partnership in Norway was only for
same-sex couples? Karen
Pinholt, Presidenta LLH: That was just for same sex couples… well, no, it was
never legally tried. I know that the presidential candidate in France entered
into a registered partnership. No one ever tried it here. And now the law has
been abolished, so we won’t know. It could probably have happened but no one
ever tried it. I believe that if someone, a heterosexual couple, would have
said ‘we want to enter into partnership, not a marriage’ they would probably
have been allowed to. But as I said, it was never tried. Now the
partnership registration is gone because we only have one marriage law and
that includes everybody. We called it the Common Marriage Law, as opposed to
Gay Marriage we call it the Common Marriage Law because it is a marriage law
for everybody. That was also a strategic choice of words, in the beginning it
was called Gender Neutral Marriage Law, but that sounded much more
provocative than Common Marriage Law, so we decided to choose these words
correctly. Agustin
Villalpando, Enkidu Magazine: Was it easy to find the words? Karen Pinholt,
Presidenta LLH: Actually these words were found by the government. We were
fighting for the Gender Neutral for a long time, until the government
administration presented the papers for the law, the first suggestions for
the law, they did not used the term we had used for a while, so well, it was
not that easy to make people change what they called it, but now I think it
is accepted as the Common Marriage Law. Agustin
Villalpando, Enkidu Magazine: Do you have a lot of diversity organizations in
the country? Karen
Pinholt, Presidenta LLH: For sexual minorities we have some small
organizations but we are by far the biggest one and we do cover or try to
cover all the many different groups within the group of sexual minorities, so
we do have gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trangender and we tried to include
intersex. We try to include everybody but there are smaller organizations for
some of those specific groups, particularly in the transgender area. There is
one organizations specifically for transvestites and there is other
specifically for transsexuals, with the diagnosis for transexualism. Dr. Lars
Ivar Owesen-Lein Borge, Enkidu Magazine: I do not have questions, I believe I
want to see the questions by our readers. I think that is much more
interesting than my questions because right now questions from Latinamerica
are more important than whatever I would ask about, because I am not capable
of understanding the questions locally, what kind of questions that will
arise, so I wait and see. So this
is how we ended our first conversation with Karen Pinhold, President of LLH.
We thank deeply the help and support of Ida Bergstrøm (LLH), whom was kind
enough to allow us to make this conversation possible. Dear
reader, you have the chance to ask questions to Karen Pinholt, President of
LLH, as we will have soon our second conversation. Please send them to info@enkidumagazine.com
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