Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, has announced she is to marry her partner, Louise Riddell.
The couple announced their engagement on Monday after a holiday in Mallorca. Dugdale, 34, who first revealed she was gay and in a same-sex relationship in April, told the Daily Record she was delighted to be getting married.
Paying tribute to equalities campaigners who had fought for same-sex marriage, the MSP said: “I’m utterly thrilled to be marrying the love of my life and we can’t wait to start planning. We hope this news brings a smile to people’s faces and we’ll certainly be toasting all those campaigners and activists who made marriage equality possible.”
The couple have been in a relationship for eight years but Dugdale had been fiercely protective of her private life; the couple were first publicly photographed together on Holyrood election polling day in May. Riddell is a college lecturer in Edinburgh.
Scotland’s equal marriage laws were pushed through after months of resistance from religious leaders in 2014, a year after England and Wales.
Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, tweeted her congratulations.
Lovely news. Congratulations @kezdugdale @ @Real_Riddell https://t.co/jZ7HsEL5IK
— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) August 8, 2016
Holyrood has three gay or bisexual party leaders, including the Tories’ Ruth Davidson, who announced in May that she will marry her Irish partner, Jennifer Wilson. Patrick Harvie, the co-convener of the Scottish Green party, is also gay, while Scotland was recently voted the best place in Europe to be gay.
Davidson was in Belfast earlier this month campaigning for equal marriage rights in Northern Ireland, where the measure is still being resisted. She said that as a Christian she was sensitive to people’s fears about the religious differences over same-sex marriage, but said politicians needed to show courage and leadership.
She said she had been physically shaking when she spoke in favour of Holyrood’s equal marriage bill three years ago. “Right now, we tell our young people: ‘You are good enough to serve in our armed forces; you are good enough to care in our hospitals; you are good enough to teach in our schools. But you are not good enough to marry the person you love and who loves you in return.
“‘That relationship – your relationship – is something different; it is something less; your commitment is denied.’ And it’s that idea of difference, of alien, of other that is at the root of all bullying, including homophobic bullying.”
