Japan’s High Court Rules Ban On Same-Sex Marriage Is Unconstitutional
A second high court in Japan has ruled that the government’s current ban against same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, pushing the country another step further towards the possibility of enacting marriage equality laws for the LGBTQ community. LGBTQ community members and activists have filed several lawsuits pushing for antidiscrimination and marriage equality laws to be enacted in the country.
The Tokyo High Court said that the ban is “groundless legal discrimination based on sexual orientation.” The court went on to say that such a ban violates a person’s constitutional guarantee of equality and “shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.”
The presiding judge Sonoe Taniguchi stated that the purpose of marriage is not only to produce children, but it is also to allow for stable legal protection for both the individuals and the partnership alike. She said that there is no rational reason to justify excluding same-sex couples from this social contract, citing a shared international consensus against discriminating based on sexual orientation, which is exactly what Japan’s current ban does.
Social opinion on the issue has definitely shifted in more recent times and many Japanese citizens have no issue with changing the law. So far, efforts to enact marriage equality for the queer community have been stopped short by Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party ruling coalition, who lost a parliamentary majority in the recent election.
The introduction of the same-sex marriage system “concerns the fundamentals of people’s lives and is closely related to each person’s view of the family,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said during a press conference. The government said it will monitor developments of other similar lawsuits in the meantime.
Japan is currently the only member of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries (G7) that does not legally recognize same-sex marriage or any other kind of legally binding protection for the LGBTQ community.
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Featured Image: Photo by ISSEI KATO. Via REUTERS
