The new leader of the left-wing opposition in Greece, Stefanos Kasselakis, has broken a taboo in his country, announcing that he wants children with his partner and that he wants to use a surrogate mother for this purpose, reports France-Presse and Agerpres.
The leader of the Greek left-wing Syriza party, Stefanos Kasselakis, with his partner, Tyler McBethPhoto: Dimitris Aspiotis / Shutterstock Editorial / Profimedia
Stefanos Kasselakis, the first openly gay politician to lead a political party in Greece, was surprisingly elected last month to lead the left-wing Syriza party, the main opposition party.
A newcomer to the Greek political scene, the 35-year-old businessman, a former trader at Goldman Sachs, introduced his American partner, an emergency medicine nurse, to the public, defying prejudice in a country where there is no marriage between people of the same sex and in which some leaders of the Orthodox Church continue to denigrate homosexuals.
“We would like to have two boys, Apollo and Elias (…) with the help of a surrogate mother,” Kasselakis said to a TV station. “We have a duty as a society to provide full equality,” he added.
Resorting to a surrogate mother is legal in Greece for heterosexual couples, but not for gay couples.
Stefanos Kasselakis also said that he hopes that his example will lead to an “awakening of parents, to learn to talk to their children… and respect their will”.
In 2015, when it was in power under former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, Syriza opened civil unions to gay couples, but they do not have the right to marry or adopt. Recently, conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced his intention to end this discrimination in the coming years.
