Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Jason Hsu (許毓仁) yesterday asked if President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration is abandoning its efforts to legalize same-sex marriage, as a bill to legalize such unions was not included in the Cabinet’s list of 72 priority bills for the next legislative session.
The Executive Yuan’s list of bills announced on Monday included proposals to amend the “one fixed day off, one flexible rest day” workweek policy, tax reform, economic booster measures, developing “green” energy sources, building “smart” infrastructure, promoting Taiwanese culture and addressing cross-strait relations.
Notably missing was the bill to legalize same-sex marriage, which was one of Tsai’s campaign promises and is a major Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) policy.
Hsu supports making same-sex marriages legal, but in a Facebook post, he wrote that he had expected the Executive Yuan to drop the bill ahead of the legislative session that opens on Friday.
Opponents of same-sex unions are sure to ramp up pressure on politicians ahead of next year’s special municipality mayoral and city and county council elections, and many candidates were likely to distance themselves from the issue, Hsu said.
Given those circumstances, he said he wondered if the government would be able to push through its bill.
The prime time for passing the bill on marriage equality would be within six months of the Council of Grand Justice’ ruling on May 24 that it was unconstitutional to deny homosexuals the right to be legally married, Hsu said.
However, the Executive Yuan’s progress on proposing a draft bill has stalled, a situation that is unlikely to be remedied soon, since former Executive Yuan secretary-general Chen Mei-ling (陳美伶), who was in charge of formulating a draft, now heads the National Development Council, Hsu said.
Premier William Lai (賴清德) should respect the grand justices’ landmark decision and resume the effort to legalize same-sex marriages, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching