The daughter of the first black Archbishop of Cape Town and bishop of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Reverend Canon Mpho Tutu, has defied all odds to marry her lesbian partner, Professor Marceline van Furth, few years after her first marriage to Joseph Burns, with whom she had two children, crashed.
According to Nairobi Wire, Mpho Tutu who is an ordained Episcopal priest, the executive director of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, and also the executive director and founder of the Tutu Institute for Prayer and Pilgrimage, got married to Furth, her long time lesbian partner, in a private ceremony in Oegstgeest, a town and municipality in the province of South Holland in western Netherlands, with a planned celebration of the marriage to be held in Cape Town, South Africa, in May.
Furth who is Dutch, is a professor in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Vrije University in Amsterdam, and holds the Desmond Tutu Chair in Medicine at the university.
Retired Archbishop Tutu who is a Nobel Prize winner, has in the past declared his support for the gay people, terming the oppression facing them as the new Apartheid.
During the launch of the Free and Equal campaign in July 2013 at Cape Town, Archbishop Tutu said that he will never worship a 'homophobic God' and would rather go to hell.
“I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place,” he had said.