Columbia Embraces Marriage Equality

Even as Republicans in the USA try to turn back time and give special rights to Christian extremists, other parts of the world are moving to embrace modernity and modern knowledge of sexuality.  A case in point is Columbia - for knuckle dragging Christofascists, Columbia is a nation in South America - whose top court ruled 6-3 in support of marriage equality.  It's telling when nations once viewed as backwaters and/or third world are now more modern and progressive in their laws than US states, especially those in the American South.  Here are highlights from The Advocate  on this development:

Colombia’s Constitutional Court voted in favor of legal marriage equality today, in a 6-3 decision, reports Spanish-language Colombian LGBT media outlet EgoCity. The ruling takes effect immediately, meaning same-sex couples can now marry throughout the South American nation. 

The decision was not wholly unexpected, as the court had long been considering a case filed by four same-sex couples who argued that the state was required to provide equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. 

Colombia becomes only the fourth Latin American nation to fully embrace marriage equality. Same-sex couples have been able to wed in Argentina since 2010, and in Brazil and Uruguay since 2013. Several Mexican states have embraced marriage equality — beginning with Mexico City in 2010 — and that country’s high court has ruled those marriages must be recognized nationwide. 

Moments after the court’s decision was made public, equality advocates gathered outside the Palace of Justice, which houses the court, in Bogotá. Wearing rainbow flags and carry pro-equality signs, demonstrators chanted “Iguales en impuestos, iguales en derechos,” according to video (below) from Colombian newspaper El Espectador. The chant translates to: “Equal in taxes, equal in rights!”

There are some who try to claim that Christianity has improved mankind's existence.  I beg to differ. The concepts of equality, logic, reason and knowledge are Enlightenment values, not a result of Christianity.  Indeed, the more deeply "Christian" states and nations are, the more embracing they are of ignorance and bigotry.  It's not a coincidence that the level of education steeply declines as one moves from liberal Christian denominations downward to the most fundamentalist denominations. Religion is the enemy of knowledge, modernity and equality.

Will Columbia Out Pace the USA on Gay Marriage?

France, Uruguay and now New Zealand have all but finalized gay marriage within the last week.  Meanwhile, the USA sits on its proverbial thumbs and the U.S. Supreme Court likely dithers trying to find a way to dodged addressing the fact that equality under the law remains a sham in this country so long as LGBT citizens are denied equal rights.  Making the situation even more embarrassing for American hubris is the fact that now Columbia may surge ahead of it in granting full equality under the law.   Why, because Columbia's highest court ruled 2 years ago that the Colombian legislature had until June 20, 2013 to fix the unequal treatment afforded to LGBT citizens.  That's right, 2 years ago.  The Columbia Law and Business Post has details on a vote to be held by the Columbia Senate today.  Here are details:

Why Is This Debate Happening Now?  The Colombian Constitutional Court issued a ruling in 2011 (Sentencia C577/11) that requires the Congress to act by June 20, 2013, or else same-sex couples can present themselves to legal notaries to contract for their legal rights. The Court ruled that same-sex couples have equal legal rights to found a family, but there is a “deficit of legal protection” for such couples under current law, and ordered the Congress to eliminate that deficit by June 20, 2013. The Court previously ruled that the right given to heterosexual couples to a legally recognized non-marital union must be accorded to same-sex couples.

Art. 13 of the Constitution guarantees equality before the law. (This is also a human right guaranteed by the American Convention on Human Rights, which is binding on Colombia. See more about this below.) To allow marriage equality is to reconcile the marriage and equality clauses; to prohibit same-sex marriage is to ignore the equality clause altogether and to invent an intention for the family clause that never existed.

Marriage Equality is Good For Business. In the United States Supreme Court, a large group of well-known employers filed a brief arguing in favor of marriage equality. They include, among others:

Abercrombie and Fitch, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Aetna, Alaskan Airlines, Alcoa, American International Group, Apple, Cisco Systems, Clorox, eBay, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Levi Strauss & Co., Marsh and McLennan Companies, Morgan Stanley, NCR Corporation, Nike, Office Depot, Oracle, Qualcomm, McGraw-Hill Companies, Tiffany and Co., Xerox

These firms all have experience as employers being forced to implement separate systems of employment and benefits for same-sex employees and their partners, which offend their corporate policies of equality and advancement and competition based on merit alone. Those policies exist for a reason: to attract and promote the best workforce and clientele. Simply put, bigotry is bad for business.

Same-Sex Couples Are No Worse and No Better Parents   There is a “scientific consensus” by sociologists, pediatricians, doctors, pyschiatrists, psychologists, and social workers that the sexual orientation of parents has no effect on the sexual orientation of children or on children’s aptitude, happiness, or any other measure of performance. The leading, most respected organizations in these fields presented their research findings and official positions to the Supreme Court of the United States in favor of marriage equality,

Marriage Equality Is Important to Colombia’s Remarkable Progress  Colombia has made a remarkable comeback from a nearly failed narco-state, and in so many respects is a leader in Latin America.  The Americas, in turn, are in the vanguard when it comes to marriage equality. Canada, Argentina, and now Uruguay permit same-sex couples to marry, as do many states in the US, Mexico, and Brazil. In Mexico and Brazil, same-sex marriages are recognized nationally. Altogether (see the table at the end of this article), approximately 35% of the population of the Americas lives in a nation or political subdivision that permits same-sex couples to marry, and another 30% lives where same-sex marriages from elsewhere are officially recognized. That’s almost 70% of the Americas where same-sex marriage is okay.

Will Colombia be a forward-looking and fair country, or retrograde, unfair, and even violent?   .   .   .   .  If it fails to align with the “first world” countries and major multinational corporations supporting marriage equality, Colombia will marginalize itself as a backward-facing country whose progress has halted. 

The BBC reports on today's vote to delay the Senate decision until April 23rd:

The Colombian Senate decided to postpone the second debate on a draft law that would allow marriage between people of the same sex until next Tuesday, April 23.

The decision was taken by 35 votes in favor and 28 against, once the television broadcast of the debate was interrupted by "prior commitments" and while in the outskirts of Congress demonstrated groups both for and against the project.

By order of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, the Colombian Parliament has until June 20 to legislate on the subject.

Otherwise, always according to the Court ruling, same-sex couples could go to the notaries and courts competent to "legalize and solemnize" ties, although it is unclear whether such unions would have a range of marriage.

The questions posed in the Columbia Law and Business Journal apply to the USA and sadly, I have more faith in Columbia getting it right than America which continues to subvert its own Constitution by allowing religious based hate and bigotry trump the Constitution itself.   

USA is Increasingly Behind the Curve on Marriage Equality

As noted a number of times, the United States of America advertises that it is the land of liberty that grants religious freedom to all.  But the reality is that the USA's advertised promise is increasingly hollow and being shown as such by neighbors both north and south of the USA's borders in the Western Hemisphere.  A piece in Foreign Policy looks at the United State's increasingly embarrassing behind the curve position compared to countries in Latin America.  Countries that many Americans once sneered at as "backwards."   Who is backwards now?  Here are highlights from the Foreign Policy article:

In his second inaugural address, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to make the United States a beacon for the world by recommitting the country to its ideals of equality. He also made history by saying those ideals demand marriage rights for same-sex couples just as they have demanded equal citizenship for women and African Americans.

But even if the Supreme Court or lawmakers soon agree with Obama's words -- "for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well" -- the United States will be a latecomer to advancing marriage rights. The world's leaders on this issue are not just from places Americans might expect -- Western Europe or Canada -- but many countries in our own hemisphere; places not usually known for progressivism on social issues. While Obama was undergoing his "evolution" on marriage rights, there has been a gay rights revolution that has stretched from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande.

One dramatic illustration: When a broad coalition of human-rights activists brought a gay rights charter to the United Nations in 2007, the push was led not by the likes of Sweden or the Netherlands, but by Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.

In 2010, Argentina's congress approved an "Equal Marriage" law, the same year same-sex marriage also became legal in Mexico City. A year later, Brazil's supreme court ruled same-sex couples were entitled to partnership rights through a kind of domestic partnership status, and some states -- including the largest, São Paulo -- are now performing full marriages for same-sex couples. The lower house of Uruguay's legislature voted in December 2012 to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, and its senate is widely expected to pass the law when it votes in April.

There were also several LGBT rights victories on issues beyond marriage. Though Bolivia's 2009 constitution bans same-sex marriage, it also bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Chile, one of South America's most conservative countries, passed a non-discrimination bill in 2012 and elected its first openly gay politician. And the government of Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner built on its passage of the marriage law to enact the world's broadest legal protections for transgender people last year.

This is not to say that all of Latin America is a gay-rights paradise. Laws throughout Central America, where there is an especially strong evangelical movement, remain particularly hostile, as they do in Peru. . . .

The specific reasons these gains have been possible differ in each country. But a major factor in all of them is that LGBT activists have managed to link their cause to broader efforts to shore up human-rights protections in countries still coping with the legacies of anti-democratic regimes that fell in the late 20th century. Additionally, the courts have embraced their role as defenders of human rights and measure themselves against international standards.

Take the case of Colombia. In 2011, the Constitutional Court ruled that same-sex couples must be considered a "family" under the law. It ordered the congress to pass a law equalizing the rights of same-sex couples within two years.  .  .  .  .  The ruling came despite strong pressure from the Catholic Church, which is continuing to lobby against same-sex marriage in the Colombian congress.

Benedetti told me in a November interview in his Bogotá office. "That is the [influence of] the Catholic religion, which always puts its principles above the rights of minorities." 

Latin America's marriage movement has been helped by the fact that most countries' courts take international jurisprudence far more seriously than do courts in the United States. Human rights law takes an especially international perspective, since almost every country in Latin America is under the jurisdiction of two human rights bodies within the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, charged with investigating violations of the American Convention on Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which adjudicates violations on the recommendation of the Commission. Though the United States, Canada, and a handful of Caribbean nations do not recognize the court's jurisdiction, most of Latin America does.

On Dec. 5, Mexico's high court sided with the three couples and said that marriage could not be restricted to heterosexual couples. Technicalities of Mexico's legal system mean that more lawsuits are still required before same-sex couples can easily marry in every state, but this ruling means that it will soon be possible.

This year, the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing exactly the same questions that Mexico's court has already resolved. But the U.S. justice system is fiercely resistant to considering legal decisions from abroad.

When the justices take up the gay marriage cases in March, there will be more at stake than the status of American gay and lesbian couples. They will be deciding whether the United States will fall behind as its neighbors establish a new standard of human rights, or whether it will join a revolution that is well underway.

That's right, the U. S. Supreme Court will ultimately be deciding whether the promises of the U. S. Constitution are a lie or whether it is time that religious based anti-gay discrimination is thrown on the trash heap of history where it belongs.  The Christofascists may revel in their hate, bigotry and ignorance, but the rest of us ought to be concerned about the USA's declining position in the world as a beacon of of freedom.

Columbia Supreme Court: Congress Has 2 Years to Enact Gay Marriage bill

In yet another embarrassing example of the sad fact that the United States no longer is the leader in religious freedom and equal protection of its citizens, the Supreme Court of Columbia - viewed, I'm sure as a banana republic drug haven by most Republicans - has directed the Columbia Congress to either enact same sex marriage within the next two (2) years or else the Court will intervene. Here in the USA, special deference to and the enshrining of Christianist religious beliefs in the civil laws still reigns supreme in a majority of states - a form of religious based bigotry that has been nationalized through the federal defense of Marriage Act. Here are highlights from Columbia Reports:
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Colombia's Supreme Court called on legislators Tuesday to pass gay marriage legislation within two years. The court ruled that homosexual partners currently lack certain rights afforded to heterosexual partners and instructed Congress to pass a remedy through "comprehensive, systematic, and orderly legislation" by June 20, 2013 to address the imbalance. If Congress does not pass legislation in that time, homosexual couples will be permitted to go before a notary or a court to have their partnership recognized.
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Colombian congressmen appear to remain split on the issue. Juan Manuel Corzo, the conservative chairman of the Senate said that "the constitution is clear in arguing that marriage is between a man and a woman, not same-sex."
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However, Rafael Prado, the director of the Liberal Party, responded to the ruling by saying, "the church is the church, but political decisions and rights are issues that we in politics have an obligation to address. We defend those rights and it is clear that same-sex couples should have equal (rights)."

Columbia Gives Gay Couples Same Rights As Marriage

It is sad that other countries in the world are moving ahead of the USA on equal marriage rights. Most Americans probably view Columbia as a less than modern country, yet now it is moving well ahead of the self-styled "land of the free." Here's a portion of 365gay.com's commentary (http://www.365gay.com/Newscon07/06/061507columbia.htm):

(Bogota) Colombia's Congress has passed legislation giving same-sex couples most of the same rights as opposite-sex married couples.

President Alvaro Uribe has said he will sign the bill into law. Under the legislation same-sex couples would have to register as partners. They would have to have lived together for more than two years and be of legal age.

In return they will receive the same social security and inheritance rights as married couples.
Supporters of the bill had tried four times since 1999 to pass the legislation, but each time it failed after opposition from the Roman Catholic Church.

Its success this time is attributed to a February Constitutional Court ruling that gay and lesbian couples must have the same property rights as opposite-sex couples.

This makes Colombia a more democratic, more open place," LGBT activist Virgilio Barco told the Reuters news service.

And sadly, it makes Columbia more democratic and open than the USA.