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Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
May 20, 2010
When Wisconsin’s domestic partner registry went into effect on Aug. 3, 2009, there was an initial rush of applications. By December, more than 1,300 same-sex couples had registered.
But the pace of registrations has dropped off sharply this year. In Milwaukee County, for example, only 22 couples have registered in 2010, down from 200 in 2009.
Overall, a total of 2,660 Wisconsinites were reported to be living in domestic-partner arrangements last year, compared to 2.4 million married people.
“I am not surprised that there was an initial surge of domestic partnership registrations when the legal protections first became available in August of 2009 and that the numbers have evened out over time,” said Katie Belanger, director of Fair Wisconsin. “The Williams Institute of the UCLA School of Law estimated that the number of couples who would register in the first calendar year would be between 1,200 and 5,000 couples, so we are certainly on track with where we thought we would be.”
Statistics from 2009 showed the continuation of a decades-long trend of fewer people in the state getting married. The Department of Health Services’ annual report on marriages and divorces in the state showed that 30,057 couples tied the knot in Wisconsin last year, 1,400 fewer than in 2008.
The state reported a total of 16,705 divorces last year, which means there were 1.8 weddings for every divorce in the state. A decade ago, there were 2.1 marriages for every divorce, and in 1920 there were 9.2.
