India’s Supreme Court Says “No” to Gay Marriage
The New York Times.Justices authored four different opinions, concurring and dissenting in part with the overall court’s finding.Some of the justices were sympathetic to the petitioners, arguing that transgender people can marry other transgender people — so long as one partner identifies as a man and another as a woman — and offering other glimmers of hope to same-sex marriage proponents.For instance, Chief Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud, as part of a two-member minority, wrote that “the right to choose one’s partner and the right to recognition of that union” should be recognized by the government, even if that union does not constitute marriage.
Responding to the government’s claim that demands for legalizing same-sex marriage were only held by “urban elites,” Chandrachud wrote that “queerness is not urban or elite,” noting that it is not just “an English-speaking man with a white-collar job who can claim to be queer,” but also “a woman working in an agricultural job in a village.”He also urged the Indian government to ensure that LGBTQ citizens are protected from discrimination in access to goods and services and from bias-motivated violence.He also encouraged allowing “queer and unmarried couples” to jointly adopt children.The ruling comes five years after the high court overturned colonial-era laws that criminalized homosexuality, finding that those laws — which proposed a 10-year-prison sentence for those convicted of “unnatural offenses” — were unconstitutional.Adish Aggarwal, the head of the Bar Council of India, said after the high court’s ruling that India was not ready to accept same-sex unions.However, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center conducted in 24 countries found that 53% of Indians favored legalizing same-sex marriage — an increase from 2014, when only 15% held similar views.Prior to the judgment, the Indian government had proposed an expert committee that would be responsible for protecting the rights of the LGBTQ community.That.
