8 ms·

Ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, Sapporo High Court rules

123 points by mikhael 3y ago

fennecbutt 3y ago
Such a shame that Japan is so modern in some ways and so backwards in others. They really need a better attitude towards gay couples. Also some of the comments on this are pretty sad, but I'm not really that surprised. Peeps are still plenty homophobic in 2024.
theodorejb 3y ago
[flagged]
- thriftwy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- kevinh 3y ago
  Governments have been including same-sex couples in marriage laws because same-sex couples wish to get married and have politically agitated for that right. Marriage, as far as I can tell, is a concept that originated in different places with multiple definitions and the scope of what can or cannot be marriage has expanded and contracted over the years.
- choilive 3y ago
  The short answer is we don't know but the current best guess is thousands of years ago in the middle-east. Marriage often has legal and financial implications. Those who want homosexual marriages probably want to also benefit from those. There are also non-trivial symbolic reasons. In this context I am using marriage and civil unions synonymously.
- Retric 3y ago
  That your cultural bubble. At least two of the Roman Emperors were in same-sex unions and far more were openly in homosexual relationships. Sodomy was just part of the culture. But cultures change, Same-sex marriage was outlawed on December 16, 342 AD by the Christian emperors Constantius II and Constans. Of note there’s a significantly longer gap between emperor Nero and 342 AD than between the founding of the US and today. As to recent trends, it’s far from a uniform shift globally. Uganda joined made homosexuality punishable by death just last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Homosexuality_Act,_2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Homosexuality_Act,_2023 Going back another 20 years. 1991 Iran declared homosexual gay sex as punishable by death. Saudi Arabia has verified executions for homosexuality as recently as 2019. etc
  - jacobriis 3y ago
    Talk about your cultural bubbles. The historicity of "same sex unions" of Roman emperors (Nero, Elagabalus) is debated. These claims may have been recorded to discredit those emperors. There was no legal recognition of same sex marriages or unions in ancient Rome.
    - Retric 3y ago
      I personally have some doubts about Elagabalus, the accounts sound like a hatchet job, it’s much closer in time to the actual ban. But, sometimes people are just nuts so we should expect some historical leaders to do some really strange things. The Nero account is both more neutral and the described wedding a public spectacle so it seems unlikely for someone to just make it up whole cloth. Though it’s also been debated extensively, we simply don’t have concrete proof either way. In terms of legality of marriage in Rome, I mostly agree. Arguably male adoption of other adult men could be largely equivalent to heterosexual marriage as far as the state were concerned. Ie name change, social rank, and property as there’s no kids and no wife possibly leaving her father’s control depending on the type of marriage. To be clear it was often a political tool, but that doesn’t mean it was always a political tool. Just something to think about.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  Who gets to define what words (like marriage) mean? I don't mean this as a flippant question - I think it's at the heart of the matter.
  - spiderice 3y ago
    I would argue that nobody does. Which is why people can have different definitions of what marriage means. Governments can decide that a homosexual union can be called marriage. Religions can decide that a homosexual union isn’t marriage. But Religions can’t expect others to accept their definition. They don’t get to demand that the government accepts their definition, unless they can get the votes.
- GrumpySloth 3y ago
  One of the strongest motivators of marriage, heterosexual or not, are tax benefits and immigration laws.
- proc0 3y ago
  The major religions have had traditions around marriage since antiquity. Arguably it exists today in the form that it does because of religion. Outside of religion, marriage has no real meaning, and to the extent that it is promoted by government, it is a fragment of how everyone had a religion up until the 20th century. This is probably the best case against gay marriage, because it could easily just be about civil union that is acknowledged by the government and granted the same benefits, without needing to call it marriage, which should be the matter for each religion to decide.
  - skywhopper 3y ago
    Sounds like the only objection you have here is calling it “marriage”. But why is that the line you choose to draw?
    - proc0 3y ago
      Changing language causes changes in culture, which may have catastrophic consequences at the civilization level. Personally, I think this is were the wisdom of thousands of previous generations have converged on religious practices and beliefs, which we are dismantling at our own risk. We are already seeing reports of population replacement problems across the developed world, which are also increasingly secular. At a personal level, I have zero pressure from society to reproduce and I suspect this is the case for millions, and because the problem spans across generations, it becomes invisible to people who are currently alive. This is what religion addresses that science may be incapable of. Now in post-modernity, we are embracing this miopic perspective at the risk of our civilization. Maybe 200 years from now the world will be 100% Muslim, and the Enlightenment will need to re-emerge, only to restart this cycle once again.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    > Outside of religion, marriage has no real meaning, and to the extent that it is promoted by government, it is a fragment of how everyone had a religion up until the 20th century. I think this is making too much of a distinction between religion and government. For most of human history, most humans were not privy to clearly-defined centralized institutions (like our modern state bureaucracies). Religious traditions were decentralized emergent phenomena that codified ways of perpetuating a functioning society in a low-trust, low-organization environments. As far as marriage specifically goes, it evolved as a practice in order to make the process of material inheritance simple, nonviolent, and easy for anyone to execute. This is where the notion of "legitimate" children comes from: legitimate in the sense of being eligible for inheritance, specifically because your parents were married. When strong centralized states started emerging, they codified this practice and built new structures on top of it.
AdrianB1 3y ago
I know nothing about the legal system in Japan, so I am asking: why several courts rule independently on the same matter? Is there a supreme court that decides or not? What are the next steps? And the other question is: what is a marriage in legal terms in Japan? In Europe marriage was originally a religious thing, officiated by priests and managed by the church; then the states stole the term to use it for a civil contract, officiated by civil servants (usually the mayor) with laws and courts managing it. For Japan, which one is in the courts?
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  The concept of marriage existed long before churches as a social contract.
- GrumpySloth 3y ago
  > In Europe marriage was originally a religious thing, officiated by priests and managed by the church Previously, not originally. In ancient Greece it was a state matter: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Greece>
- skywhopper 3y ago
  What a weird way to look at it. States “stole” the term “marriage”? Sorry, that’s not how any of it ever worked.
  - retrac 3y ago
    It's maybe oddly phrased, but in much of Europe, the state did assume power over marriage from the church at some point. Sometimes very dramatically, such as during the French Revolution, when priests were banned from marrying people in the traditional manner and people were compelled to register their marriages with the government. I can see why one might describe that as stealing marriage from the church; or if not stealing, then perhaps expropriation.
  - AdrianB1 3y ago
    Until 100 years ago there was no civil marriage in my country and no civil laws regarding marriage, it was just some penal law punishing polygamy. Then the state took ownership of the notion of marriage by regulating it by law and forbidding churches to perform marriage ceremonies unless you get married by the state, so the religious marriage is just a ceremony with no legal implications these days. So yes, the state stole the term. It's like tomorrow the state decides by law that everything that color red will be called color blue, that would be stealing the word "blue" and use it to define the color of red things. It is not a natural evolution of language.
belorn 3y ago
I am a bit curious about the tax benefits that the article mentions in the end. How does it work?
- jwrallie 3y ago
  You get lower taxes if you add your wife / husband as a dependent and your shared income is below a certain threshold.
jwrallie 3y ago
One of my friends was fearing of being forced to leave his partner behind in Japan and having to go back to his home country when he had trouble securing a new job, even if his partner’s salary could more than cover for his expenses. To get permanent residence he needs to live 10 years in Japan while working and paying taxes. For some people the difference in rights might feel small but there are certain edge cases when it makes a big difference. If my friend's partner was not the same sex as his, then he would be eligible to a spouse visa regardless of job status and could get permanent residence in as low as 3 years.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
  Note that the issues you're talking about are, in substance, really about immigration and the legalisms therein. They're not about marriage in itself. The fact that marriage comes with other immigration and residency privileges means that it enters the conversation often when immigration is the topic. I'm not sure that it makes sense to alter marriage to solve immigration issues.
  - Renaud 3y ago
    How about rights of care when your partner of 20 years can’t make medical decisions because your relationship is not recognised? Or i inheritance rights when you pass away and you lifelong partner gets little or nothing because your relationship doesn’t mean anything to the state? What about parenting rights? And what about simply people who decide to commit to a relationship enjoy the same rights, privileges and duties as anyone else instead of making them second rate citizens unworthy of the protection and recognition of the state?
    - mysterydip 3y ago
      Can't you sign power of attorney papers, explicitly list people in a will, and name guardians for children? It sounds like it's just not implicit or automatic (which is obviously desirable). Is that correct or am I off base?
nikolay 3y ago
[flagged]
- goosedragons 3y ago
  Obviously this depends on jurisdiction but there's certain extra rights that come with marriage, things like being able to decide what happens to your partner when they're in a coma, tax benefits, etc. And of course for most people it's a show of love.
  - nikolay 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - swatcoder 3y ago
      Perhaps it could be, but it's not. Most people on all sides of the issue view see an extensive overhaul of whatever existing legal and bureaucratic system to be much more burdensome and intractable than revisiting who might qualify for the existing word.
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  Why don't Christians want to enter "christian unions" and cede control over the word "marriage" to the state as a legal construct? Alternatively, why does the state not abandon the idea of "marriage" altogether and only recognize domestic partnership? The problem with "civil union" is not the core idea of it, which is sound, but that it is fruit from a poisonous tree. The construct exists for the purpose of discrimination. It doesn't make sense without the desire to discriminate. "Civil Union" exists explicitly to mean "marriage, but lesser."
  - indigochill 3y ago
    > Why don't Christians want to enter "christian unions" and cede control over the word "marriage" to the state as a legal construct? Because many Christians to varying degrees don't see marriage as a legal construct (whether exclusively, primarily, or at all, depending on the person), but as a religious one. "Civil Union" is the name that designates the legal construct, as the name implies. > Alternatively, why does the state not abandon the idea of "marriage" altogether and only recognize domestic partnership? I think this is something everyone could get on board with. It lets the religious sphere take back the "marriage" term while putting everyone on equal footing in the civil sphere. ...then we get to argue over what qualifies someone to be a husband/wife vs a partner!
hayst4ck 3y ago
For some context I find interesting, Taiwan was the first country in Asia to legalize same sex marriage using a similar method of courts declaring that it was illegal for same sex marriage to not be legal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Taiwan
- simpletone 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - itsZero 3y ago
    Well, I, for one, am Taiwanese and happy to see it happen. We also did legalize gay marriage (albeit unfortunately through a special law instead of fixing the civil laws).
    - simpletone 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - catlover76 3y ago
    [dead]
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]
omeysalvi 3y ago
I love the fact that the ruling came from a court in a location called Sapporo (Sapphic)

123 points by mikhael 3y ago

Such a shame that Japan is so modern in some ways and so backwards in others. They really need a better attitude towards gay couples. Also some of the comments on this are pretty sad, but I'm not really that surprised. Peeps are still plenty homophobic in 2024.

theodorejb 3y ago

[flagged]

thriftwy 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kevinh 3y ago
Governments have been including same-sex couples in marriage laws because same-sex couples wish to get married and have politically agitated for that right. Marriage, as far as I can tell, is a concept that originated in different places with multiple definitions and the scope of what can or cannot be marriage has expanded and contracted over the years.
choilive 3y ago
The short answer is we don't know but the current best guess is thousands of years ago in the middle-east. Marriage often has legal and financial implications. Those who want homosexual marriages probably want to also benefit from those. There are also non-trivial symbolic reasons. In this context I am using marriage and civil unions synonymously.
Retric 3y ago
That your cultural bubble. At least two of the Roman Emperors were in same-sex unions and far more were openly in homosexual relationships. Sodomy was just part of the culture. But cultures change, Same-sex marriage was outlawed on December 16, 342 AD by the Christian emperors Constantius II and Constans. Of note there’s a significantly longer gap between emperor Nero and 342 AD than between the founding of the US and today. As to recent trends, it’s far from a uniform shift globally. Uganda joined made homosexuality punishable by death just last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Homosexuality_Act,_2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Homosexuality_Act,_2023 Going back another 20 years. 1991 Iran declared homosexual gay sex as punishable by death. Saudi Arabia has verified executions for homosexuality as recently as 2019. etc
- jacobriis 3y ago
  Talk about your cultural bubbles. The historicity of "same sex unions" of Roman emperors (Nero, Elagabalus) is debated. These claims may have been recorded to discredit those emperors. There was no legal recognition of same sex marriages or unions in ancient Rome.
  - Retric 3y ago
    I personally have some doubts about Elagabalus, the accounts sound like a hatchet job, it’s much closer in time to the actual ban. But, sometimes people are just nuts so we should expect some historical leaders to do some really strange things. The Nero account is both more neutral and the described wedding a public spectacle so it seems unlikely for someone to just make it up whole cloth. Though it’s also been debated extensively, we simply don’t have concrete proof either way. In terms of legality of marriage in Rome, I mostly agree. Arguably male adoption of other adult men could be largely equivalent to heterosexual marriage as far as the state were concerned. Ie name change, social rank, and property as there’s no kids and no wife possibly leaving her father’s control depending on the type of marriage. To be clear it was often a political tool, but that doesn’t mean it was always a political tool. Just something to think about.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
PlunderBunny 3y ago
Who gets to define what words (like marriage) mean? I don't mean this as a flippant question - I think it's at the heart of the matter.
- spiderice 3y ago
  I would argue that nobody does. Which is why people can have different definitions of what marriage means. Governments can decide that a homosexual union can be called marriage. Religions can decide that a homosexual union isn’t marriage. But Religions can’t expect others to accept their definition. They don’t get to demand that the government accepts their definition, unless they can get the votes.
GrumpySloth 3y ago
One of the strongest motivators of marriage, heterosexual or not, are tax benefits and immigration laws.
proc0 3y ago
The major religions have had traditions around marriage since antiquity. Arguably it exists today in the form that it does because of religion. Outside of religion, marriage has no real meaning, and to the extent that it is promoted by government, it is a fragment of how everyone had a religion up until the 20th century. This is probably the best case against gay marriage, because it could easily just be about civil union that is acknowledged by the government and granted the same benefits, without needing to call it marriage, which should be the matter for each religion to decide.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  Sounds like the only objection you have here is calling it “marriage”. But why is that the line you choose to draw?
  - proc0 3y ago
    Changing language causes changes in culture, which may have catastrophic consequences at the civilization level. Personally, I think this is were the wisdom of thousands of previous generations have converged on religious practices and beliefs, which we are dismantling at our own risk. We are already seeing reports of population replacement problems across the developed world, which are also increasingly secular. At a personal level, I have zero pressure from society to reproduce and I suspect this is the case for millions, and because the problem spans across generations, it becomes invisible to people who are currently alive. This is what religion addresses that science may be incapable of. Now in post-modernity, we are embracing this miopic perspective at the risk of our civilization. Maybe 200 years from now the world will be 100% Muslim, and the Enlightenment will need to re-emerge, only to restart this cycle once again.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > Outside of religion, marriage has no real meaning, and to the extent that it is promoted by government, it is a fragment of how everyone had a religion up until the 20th century. I think this is making too much of a distinction between religion and government. For most of human history, most humans were not privy to clearly-defined centralized institutions (like our modern state bureaucracies). Religious traditions were decentralized emergent phenomena that codified ways of perpetuating a functioning society in a low-trust, low-organization environments. As far as marriage specifically goes, it evolved as a practice in order to make the process of material inheritance simple, nonviolent, and easy for anyone to execute. This is where the notion of "legitimate" children comes from: legitimate in the sense of being eligible for inheritance, specifically because your parents were married. When strong centralized states started emerging, they codified this practice and built new structures on top of it.

AdrianB1 3y ago

I know nothing about the legal system in Japan, so I am asking: why several courts rule independently on the same matter? Is there a supreme court that decides or not? What are the next steps? And the other question is: what is a marriage in legal terms in Japan? In Europe marriage was originally a religious thing, officiated by priests and managed by the church; then the states stole the term to use it for a civil contract, officiated by civil servants (usually the mayor) with laws and courts managing it. For Japan, which one is in the courts?

fennecbutt 3y ago
The concept of marriage existed long before churches as a social contract.
GrumpySloth 3y ago
> In Europe marriage was originally a religious thing, officiated by priests and managed by the church Previously, not originally. In ancient Greece it was a state matter: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Greece>
skywhopper 3y ago
What a weird way to look at it. States “stole” the term “marriage”? Sorry, that’s not how any of it ever worked.
- retrac 3y ago
  It's maybe oddly phrased, but in much of Europe, the state did assume power over marriage from the church at some point. Sometimes very dramatically, such as during the French Revolution, when priests were banned from marrying people in the traditional manner and people were compelled to register their marriages with the government. I can see why one might describe that as stealing marriage from the church; or if not stealing, then perhaps expropriation.
- AdrianB1 3y ago
  Until 100 years ago there was no civil marriage in my country and no civil laws regarding marriage, it was just some penal law punishing polygamy. Then the state took ownership of the notion of marriage by regulating it by law and forbidding churches to perform marriage ceremonies unless you get married by the state, so the religious marriage is just a ceremony with no legal implications these days. So yes, the state stole the term. It's like tomorrow the state decides by law that everything that color red will be called color blue, that would be stealing the word "blue" and use it to define the color of red things. It is not a natural evolution of language.

belorn 3y ago

I am a bit curious about the tax benefits that the article mentions in the end. How does it work?

jwrallie 3y ago
You get lower taxes if you add your wife / husband as a dependent and your shared income is below a certain threshold.

jwrallie 3y ago

One of my friends was fearing of being forced to leave his partner behind in Japan and having to go back to his home country when he had trouble securing a new job, even if his partner’s salary could more than cover for his expenses. To get permanent residence he needs to live 10 years in Japan while working and paying taxes. For some people the difference in rights might feel small but there are certain edge cases when it makes a big difference. If my friend's partner was not the same sex as his, then he would be eligible to a spouse visa regardless of job status and could get permanent residence in as low as 3 years.

lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
Note that the issues you're talking about are, in substance, really about immigration and the legalisms therein. They're not about marriage in itself. The fact that marriage comes with other immigration and residency privileges means that it enters the conversation often when immigration is the topic. I'm not sure that it makes sense to alter marriage to solve immigration issues.
- Renaud 3y ago
  How about rights of care when your partner of 20 years can’t make medical decisions because your relationship is not recognised? Or i inheritance rights when you pass away and you lifelong partner gets little or nothing because your relationship doesn’t mean anything to the state? What about parenting rights? And what about simply people who decide to commit to a relationship enjoy the same rights, privileges and duties as anyone else instead of making them second rate citizens unworthy of the protection and recognition of the state?
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    Can't you sign power of attorney papers, explicitly list people in a will, and name guardians for children? It sounds like it's just not implicit or automatic (which is obviously desirable). Is that correct or am I off base?

nikolay 3y ago

[flagged]

goosedragons 3y ago
Obviously this depends on jurisdiction but there's certain extra rights that come with marriage, things like being able to decide what happens to your partner when they're in a coma, tax benefits, etc. And of course for most people it's a show of love.
- nikolay 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    Perhaps it could be, but it's not. Most people on all sides of the issue view see an extensive overhaul of whatever existing legal and bureaucratic system to be much more burdensome and intractable than revisiting who might qualify for the existing word.
hayst4ck 3y ago
Why don't Christians want to enter "christian unions" and cede control over the word "marriage" to the state as a legal construct? Alternatively, why does the state not abandon the idea of "marriage" altogether and only recognize domestic partnership? The problem with "civil union" is not the core idea of it, which is sound, but that it is fruit from a poisonous tree. The construct exists for the purpose of discrimination. It doesn't make sense without the desire to discriminate. "Civil Union" exists explicitly to mean "marriage, but lesser."
- indigochill 3y ago
  > Why don't Christians want to enter "christian unions" and cede control over the word "marriage" to the state as a legal construct? Because many Christians to varying degrees don't see marriage as a legal construct (whether exclusively, primarily, or at all, depending on the person), but as a religious one. "Civil Union" is the name that designates the legal construct, as the name implies. > Alternatively, why does the state not abandon the idea of "marriage" altogether and only recognize domestic partnership? I think this is something everyone could get on board with. It lets the religious sphere take back the "marriage" term while putting everyone on equal footing in the civil sphere. ...then we get to argue over what qualifies someone to be a husband/wife vs a partner!

hayst4ck 3y ago

For some context I find interesting, Taiwan was the first country in Asia to legalize same sex marriage using a similar method of courts declaring that it was illegal for same sex marriage to not be legal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Taiwan

simpletone 3y ago
[flagged]
- itsZero 3y ago
  Well, I, for one, am Taiwanese and happy to see it happen. We also did legalize gay marriage (albeit unfortunately through a special law instead of fixing the civil laws).
  - simpletone 3y ago
    [flagged]
- catlover76 3y ago
  [dead]

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago

[dead]

omeysalvi 3y ago

I love the fact that the ruling came from a court in a location called Sapporo (Sapphic)