By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

STOCKHOLM, April 2, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Swedish parliament voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to legalize same-sex “marriage,” making it the fifth EU member country, after the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Norway, to recognize “gender-neutral marriage,” and joining Canada, South Africa and some US states in giving in to the homosexual agenda.

The law was passed by 261 votes to 22, with 66 abstaining or absent, and will come into force on the first day of May.

The new legislation repeals a 1987 law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

“The decision means that gender no longer has an impact on the ability to marry and that the law on registered partnership is repealed,” the government said on its website. This means that homosexuals, who until now have been allowed to register their “partnerships” in a civil ceremony, can now demand a church wedding.

The Lutheran Church of Sweden has expressed support for the new law, according to Agence France-Presse, though the new law apparently allows individual pastors the freedom to opt out of “marrying” same-sex couples.

“The breakdown of the whole notion of marriage did not begin with homosexual ‘marriage’,” said Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute, in response to the news. “It ends with homosexual ‘marriage.'”

Mosher said the traditional family has come to “the end of the road” in Sweden, where over 60% of children are born to out of wedlock parents, and crime rates have risen, which Mosher attributes to the lack of the stability in children’s lives that is afforded by the traditional family.

 “When you allow homosexuals to ‘marry,’ you are saying that the aspect of raising children, the aspect of procreation is completely irrelevant,” warned Mosher. “You are finally divorcing what you call marriage from any relationship of bearing and having children, and that empties out the concept entirely, making it devoid of any significance. So it’s the end of the road for the family.”

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/apr/09040201.html