May 24, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Taiwan's highest court has imposed homosexuality-based “marriage” on the island nation, instructing parliament that it has two years to pass a law allowing same-sex “marriages” or they will automatically become legal.
The Constitutional Court ruling comes after a pro-“Same-Sex Marriage Act” stalled in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament, after massive opposition protests on the island nation that rivaled recent pro-natural-marriage rallies in France on a per capita basis.
The ruling, if allowed to stand, would make Taiwan the first country in Asia to allow “marriages” based on homosexuality.
In a press release about its decision, the Court stated that allowing homosexual “marriage” is “equally essential to homosexuals and heterosexuals, given the importance of the freedom of marriage to the sound development of personality and safeguarding of human dignity.”
It stated that same-sex “marriages” will not affect opposite-sex (i.e., normal) marriages, nor undermine the social order of the island nation, formally named the Republic of China (ROC). (The mainland Communist People’s Republic of China insists that the ROC name is illegitimate, claiming it alone represents the Chinese people.)
The Taiwan court called the current inability of homosexuals to get married “obviously a gross legislative flaw.”
Courts replace legislature
The high court ruling is reminiscent of how same-sex “marriage” advanced legally in the United States — with judges' successive rulings in favor of legalizing it effectively disenfranchising millions of Americans who voted to reject the concept in one state ballot after another.
President Tsai Ing-wen of the liberal Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is a strong supporter of LGBT policies, including homosexual “marriage.” The party swept her into office last year by defeating the more conservative Kuomintang Party that had ruled Taiwan since World War II. But the massive protests stalled her goal of legalizing “gay marriage” through the parliament.
“The Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, openly supported legalizing same-sex marriage during her campaign, but in the year since she came to power and amid low approval ratings, she declined to aggressively push for amending the law,” The Guardian newspaper reported.
Ing-wen appointed seven of the 15 members of the Constitutional Court, so pro-family advocates were expecting the liberal decision.
Brian Camenker of the American pro-family group Mass Resistance, which assisted the pro-family traditional-marriage forces in Taiwan, said there is an additional element inducing corruption in the ROC high court: “The Justices of the [Taiwanese] Supreme court have a term limit of eight years. But they are allowed to hold concurrent government posts by the President’s direct assignment. This directly affects their careers and especially their income.”
“Gays” cannot change?
In another parallel to the United States courts, the Taiwanese high court declared, “Sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic that is resistant to change.” Such findings ignore people like Stephen Black, a childhood victim of predators who once identified as “gay” but is now in a long and happy natural marriage with children. (Black runs the ex-“gay” ministry group First Stone.)
The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2015 decision establishing homosexual “marriage,” Obergefell v. Hodges, similarly posited the “immutable nature” of homosexuals. The author of that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy, twice claimed that homosexuality was “immutable” in the 2015 ruling.
But Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council, wrote in 2015 that Justice Kennedy’s immutability assertion is “unsubstantiated.”
Sprigg wrote: “None of this is to suggest that changing one’s sexual orientation is easy. Most people will never try, and of those who do try, some will fail. But some also succeed. This, and the fact that some people move from homosexual relationships to heterosexual ones — or vice versa — serve as proof that sexual orientation is not “immutable.”
ROC battle not over
Mass Resistance wrote yesterday, “We’ve been told by several sources that the expected Court ruling on Wednesday will initiate a massive reaction and that the fight will continue and even accelerate — unlike in the U.S. where the national pro-family movement basically wrung its hands and accepted it.”
Camenker told LifeSiteNews that the polling on “gay marriage” in the ROC is like that in the United States on Trump leading up to the U.S. election: strongly biased toward liberals. The polls say most people in Taiwan support same-sex “marriage,” but the reality is the opposite, he said.
BBC reports that, “The LGBT community hopes legislators will simply amend the existing marriage laws to include same-sex couples. … However, they fear parliament won't do that and will instead pass a new law that recognizes same-sex marriages but gives them only some rights, not equal treatment in all matters.”
“Religious and parents groups opposed to gay marriage say they will lobby parliament not to pass any laws on legalization,” according to BBC. “They argue such an important matter that affects the whole of society shouldn't be decided by just a few grand justices, but by the people in a referendum.”
Camenker told LifeSiteNews that Taiwanese Christians have more fight in them than American Christians on the issue of radically redefining marriage.
The Guardian reports that homosexuality-based “marriage” is now legal in 20 countries, 13 of which are in Europe. The Netherlands became the first in 2001.