Same-sex couple Robyn Peoples and Sharni Edwards married in Carrickfergus in a ceremony and made history with their marriage as a first in Northern Ireland on February 11.
The couple engaged in 2015 and they’d been waiting to be able to marry since. Northern Ireland only just made same-sex marriage legal on January 13th, and so now Peoples and Edwards have become the first same-sex couple to marry!
In Times Magazine, Edwards said that for their engagement: “Robyn had had a lock engraved by the end of their holiday in May 2015”, and that “she asked [sic] to put it on one of the bridges, and when I turned around, she was down on one knee and she proposed.” In BBC, Edwards said: “We didn’t set out to make history – we just fell in love.”
The Love Equality coalition of six organizations has been anticipating for years for equal marriage in Northern Ireland. The UK introduced this idea in 2005 “giving couples in civil partnerships mostly the same legal rights and responsibilities as married couples.” The biggest group in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the socially conservative Democratic Unionst Party opposed legalization in 2014, but the British Parliament last year then brought the region into line with the rest of the country.
Peoples said in BBC, “While this campaign ends with Sharni and I saying ‘I do’, it started with people saying ‘No’ to inequality” and that “By standing together, we’ve made history.”
The LGTB+ community in Northern Ireland has been fighting for gay marriage for years, and Rachel Savage writes in Reuters about this “new culture war” — so, finally gay marriage has become legal.
Edwards said in BBC: “We are so grateful to the thousands of people who marched for our freedoms, to the Love Equality campaign who led the way and the politicians who voted to change the law.”
Header image still via NBC News/YouTube
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