In October last year, Premier William Lai (賴清德) told the public that he had not given up on drafting a proposal to legalize same-sex marriage by the end of the year. He promised not to delay the issue and said he would do his best to push it forward.
While it would have taken a really naive person to take his words at face value, it is still disheartening that nothing has happened at all, with only three months left until the first anniversary of the historic ruling by the Council of Grand Justices instructing the government to legalize same-sex marriage.
In the meantime, Australia legalized same-sex marriage in December last year, while last month, the Taipei High Administrative Court rejected the third lesbian couple who attempted to register their marriage since October last year. The court said that since the amendments legalizing same-sex marriage had not cleared the legislature, it had no legal basis to approve the marriage application.
While same-sex couples would automatically be granted the right to marry once the two-year period stipulated by the council is over, the delay gives the opposition plenty of time to cook up schemes that are not likely to work, but are simply insulting to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, as well as the Constitution, as restrictions on same-sex marriage have been ruled unconstitutional by the council.
When the Referendum Act (公民投票法) was amended in December last year, lowering the thresholds for initiating, seconding and passing referendums, it was almost expected that the groups opposed to gay marriage would jump on it to further their agenda.
They have wasted no time, as the Alliance for the Happiness of Future Generations on Friday last week submitted a proposal for a referendum on same-sex marriage, garnering 3,549 signatures — about 900 shy of the one that proposed changing the nation’s Olympic team name from “Chinese Taipei” to “Taiwan.”
The group urged the government to let the public decide whether to legalize same-sex marriage, saying that most Taiwanese do not support changing the definition of marriage in the Civil Code, which appears based on its own survey conducted prior to the ruling.
Nevertheless, the law trumps public opinion and even the most conservative poll conducted before the ruling showed that 52 percent of Taiwanese supported same-sex marriage.
There is no point arguing against these groups, as they are not likely to stop even after gay marriage is formally legalized, but it just continues to highlight that the government has not taken action to turn the ruling into law.
The government is not helping itself by continuing to brush aside the gay marriage issue.
Taking action on same-sex marriage is a simple way for the government to show sincerity and salvage some of its reputation.
Same-sex unions would be legalized in May next year in any case, unless the government has other ideas, as Lai might or might not have suggested late last year when he said that it will take time to seek appropriate proposals due to societal reservations on the issue.
People should not dismiss the issue of gay marriage only because it will eventually be legalized. It is a human rights issue, and the long wait is simply agonizing to the LGBT community — many of whom desperately need to marry for legitimate, practical reasons — and the people who support them in their fight for equality.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS