Gallery Carre
Gay marriage in South Africa
Dec 12th, 2024 by Viviane
It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be visiting South Africa’s constitutional court in Johannesburg on the morning its judges were announcing a decision of profound social importance. It was equally coincidental that it happened within a few days of an equally significant change in the law in this country, on the same subject: how to give gay and lesbian couples rights approximating to those of marriage.
Our solution was to offer the uneasy British compromise of civil partnerships, much welcomed but falling short of full-blooded marriage (though the media have had no compunctions about referring to gay marriages, and I’m sure that, in spite of its legal inaccuracy, people will speak in the same terms).
The top South African court’s decision had no truck with such halfway houses. A law which insisted that a marriage can only be between a husband and a wife was, quite simply, unconstitutional and had to be amended, it ruled. The exclusion of gays and lesbians, Judge Albie Sachs said, “represents a harsh, if oblique, statement by the law that same sex couples are outsiders, and that their need for affirmation and protection of their intimate relations as human beings is somehow less than that of heterosexual couples”.
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Now, wait a minute. While the home of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is busy banning gay marriage, the land of apartheid is doing better.