Greece

NYTimes:

ATHENS — Defying governmental wrath, the mayor of a remote Greek island performed the country’s first same-sex marriages on Tuesday, wedding two men and two women.The civil ceremonies, held at sunrise in the nondescript town hall of Tilos, a tiny island in the eastern Aegean Sea, defied statements by a senior Greek prosecutor last week that such unions were illegal.“It’s done, now,” the mayor, Anastassios Aliferis, said in a telephone interview. “The unions have been registered and the licenses have been issued. It’s a historic moment.” With its abundance of glamorous gay bars and summer island resorts such as Mykonos, Greece has long drawn thousands of gay tourists annually. But gays and lesbians in this European Union nation of 11 million people frequently complain of discrimination. Public displays of affection are widely frowned upon. The country’s military bars gays from joining its ranks, and in 1993 a private Greek television network, Mega Channel, was fined $116,000 by the National Radio and Television Council for showing men kissing in a weekly drama. Greece’s powerful Orthodox Church has also denounced homosexuality as a sin and “defect of human nature.” On Tuesday, however, a bubbling just-married Evangelia Vlami emerged from the Tilos town hall, telling the BBC that the unions would help end discrimination. “We did this to encourage other gay people to take a stand,” she said.