Advancing human rights through constitutional protection for gays and lesbians in South Africa

As a consequence of the 1994 adoption of a justiciable Bill of Rights in South Africa, with an equality provision prohibiting discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation, a coalition of gay and lesbian organisations set about implementing a progressive agenda of gay and lesbian rights litigation. In striking down the offence of sodomy, the Constitutional Court established a jurisprudence of gay and lesbian rights to equality, dignity and privacy that proved to be the foundation for significant litigation around family law issues. Subsequent to the sodomy judgement, the Court has ruled that same-sex couples who are in permanent life partnerships should be entitled to the same rights as married couples to immigration, employment benefits, custody and adoption of children. Despite the extensive equality jurisprudence of the Court, it is still uncertain whether it will rule in the future in favour of same-sex marriage or in favour of a civil union/domestic partnership model.     

Windsor and Perry: Reactions of Siblings in Same-Sex and Heterosexual Couples

The U.S. Supreme Court decisions in U.S. v. Windsor (570 U.S. 307) and Hollingsworth v. Perry (570 U.S. 399) created a focal point for public discussion of marriage equality for same-sex couples. This article reports the results of an exploratory study of the reactions of individuals currently or previously in same-sex couple relationships and a heterosexual sibling who is currently or previously married (N = 371) to the Supreme Court decisions. Thematic content analysis was used to explore participants’ responses to an open-ended question on a survey. Reactions of individuals from same-sex couples revealed the following themes: (1) longitudinal perspectives on the advancement of rights for same-sex couples; (2) emotional responses celebrating the decisions or expressing relief; (3) affirmation of their relationship or rights; (4) practical consequences of the extension of rights; and (5) minority stress related to anticipation of future prejudice or discrimination. Themes in the heterosexual siblings’ responses were (1) ally support; (2) flat support without emotion or elaboration; (3) indifference to or ignorance about the decisions; and (4) disapproval of the decisions. These themes are compared and discussed in light of prior research on reactions to marriage restriction debates and marriage (in)equality and family relationships.     

Sexuality and human rights in europe

Written human rights law in Europe is as scanty as in the rest of the world. Case-law however provides considerable protection of sexual rights. It guarantees comprehensive protection of autonomy in sexual life, also for minors, and provides protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Negative attitudes of a majority may not justify interferences with the sexual rights of a minority and society could be expected to tolerate a certain inconvenience to enable individuals to live in dignity and worth in accordance with the sexual identity chosen by them. Compensation for interference with sexual autonomy and freedom is awarded. This high-level protection (as compared to other parts of the world) is however limited. It seems to be granted only in areas where it corresponds with public attitudes and social developments. And it is seldom secured on the national level but nearly exclusively by the European Court of Human Rights, whose case-law is often weakened by inconsistency.     

Backlash or a Positive Response?: Public Opinion of LGB Issues After Obergefell v. Hodges

ABSTRACT

Following Obergefell v. Hodges, same-sex marriage remains controversial and anti-LGBT state legislation has been passed, which raises questions about whether the Supreme Court’s ruling may have created a backlash. We use data from two waves of a general population survey of Nebraskans conducted before and after the decision to answer three questions. First, we test three theories of how the court decision influenced public opinion. We find that support for same-sex marriage was significantly higher following the ruling, suggesting that there was not a backlash to it. Second, we assess whether people perceive that the court accurately reflects the public’s opinion. We find that people who favor same-sex marriage are more likely to think that the ruling refects public opinion very well; those who oppose same-sex marriage are more likely to think that the ruling does not at all reflect public opinion. Third, we examine the association between discussing gay rights and support for same-sex marriage, finding that those who talk about LGB issues very often are more likely to favor same-sex marriage. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to two of the themes of this special issue: the influence of marriage equality on Americans’ understandings of marriage and the impact of marriage equality on future LGBT activism.     

Our bodies,our choices: Australian law on foetal personhood

The debate revolving around foetal vs maternal rights has been philosophised for years. It has captured attention internationally with the European Court of Human Rights struggling for over five decades to define personhood, and is still yet to reach a definite formulation. A proposed Law Crimes Amendment Bill (Zoe's Law, 2) is currently fuelling public debate about women's reproductive choices in New South Wales, Australia. The proposed legal bill attempts to redefine a ‘person’ or ‘human being’ by placing a marker on when ‘personhood begins’ namely at 20 weeks or weighing a minimum of 400 g. Similar laws recognising personhood at foetal viability have come into force in the United States of America that clearly show the broader consequences of this kind of legislation as American women now face county-by-county, state-by-state anti-choice legislative activism. Midwives work closely with women and their families giving them the authority to formulate opinions on issues of maternal–foetal conflict. If a law such as this is allowed to pass a number of legal and ethical issues will arise for Australian midwives that could potentially have far reaching implications for them and for the women and families that they provide women centred care for.     

Same-Sex Marriage and the Assimilationist Dilemma: A Research Agenda on Marriage Equality and the Future of LGBTQ Activism,Politics, Communities,and Identities

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, examines the impact of the marriage equality movement and the resulting landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S., on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) activism, politics, communities, and identities. The articles in this issue examine the complicated ways in which the discourse used in same-sex marriage court cases is related to heteronormative discursive frames; the lived reality of married same-sex couples and the complex ways in which they think about marriage and heteronormativity; the ways that heteronormativity is racialized, which affects how African Americans perceive the impact of same-sex marriage on their lives; how same-sex marriage has influenced public opinion and the likelihood of anti-gay backlash; and the impact of same-sex marriage on family law. In this article, I draw on the empirical research from these articles to develop a theoretical framework that expands a multi-institutional (MIP) approach to understanding social movements and legal change. I build on and develop three conceptual tools: the assimilationist dilemma, discursive integration and cooptation, and truth regime. I conclude by laying out an agenda for future research on the impact of same-sex marriage on LGBTQ movements, politics, identities, and communities.     

Educating gay male youth: since when is pornography a path towards self-respect?

In 2000, in the case of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium, the Canadian Supreme Court was asked to determine whether gay male pornography violated the sex equality protections guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Throughout this case, gay male activists and academics emphasised the risk posed by antipornography legal strategies to the dissemination of materials intended to promote safer sexual behaviour. Other arguments were advanced that gay male pornography should not be restricted because it serves as a learning tool for young men and, in so doing, does much to reduce the alarming incidence of gay youth suicide. The author examines these assumptions within the context of the gay male pornography defended in Little Sisters. His conclusion is that the present gay male obsession with hyper-masculinity, best evidenced in the pornography now widely touted by some gay men as a source of gay male identity and freedom, undermines safer sexual practices and the self-respect needed to combat youth suicide. The author concludes that gay men must commit to a sexuality built on mutuality, respect and caring (i.e., an identity politic built around sex equality).     

Daring to Marry: Marriage Equality Activism After Proposition 8 as Challenge to the Assimilationist/Radical Binary in Queer Studies

I analyze three case studies of marriage equality activism and marriage equality–based groups after the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Evaluating the JoinTheImpact protests of 2008, the LGBTQ rights group GetEQUAL, and the group One Struggle One Fight, I argue that these groups revise queer theoretical arguments about marriage equality activism as by definition assimilationist, homonormative, and single-issue. In contrast to such claims, the cases studied here provide a snapshot of heterogeneous, intersectional, and coalition-based social justice work in which creative methods of protest, including direct action and flash mobs, are deployed in militant ways for marriage rights and beyond.     

A Comment on Schoen's (1981) Harmonic Mean Marriage Model

Schoen (1981) proposes a two-sex marriage function based on the harmonic mean of the numbers of men and women at given ages. This is a comment on the argument provided by Schoen, which shows that it does not in fact lead to a marriage function based on the harmonic mean but on the product of the numbers of men and women at given ages. This does not mean that the harmonic mean is not a valid basis for a marriage function, but only that the argument used by Schoen is not a demonstration of its validity.     

Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Marriage: The Case of Scandinavia

The purpose of this study was to examine the variables that explain attitudes toward same-sex marriage. Using recently collected Scandinavian data (from Norway and Sweden) with a high response rate, this study shows that gender, regular participation in religious activities, political ideology, education, whether the respondent lived in the capital city, and attitudes toward gender equality were important for attitudes toward same-sex marriage. Age and income were not important for attitudes toward same-sex marriage. Although both Norwegians and Swedes clearly favor same-sex marriage, Swedes are significantly more positive than Norwegians.     

Transsexuals and European human rights law

Sexual identity is a legal status, and as such it is as much dependent on public policy as on self-identification. However, because this status can be crucial to one's role in society, a conflict between the legal status and an individual's perceptions or aspirations creates a dilemma if society is committed to individual freedom. This difficulty can become particularly acute where it is technically possible for an individual to alter some of the factors used socially or legally to determine sexual identity. This paper analyses these difficulties, both from the situation of endocrine disorder and with respect to gender identity. It argues that this distinction in approach may not be a valid basis for different legal treatment. It considers four major issues: the stage at which a change of gender should be recognised; any preconditions to which a legal change of gender should be made subject; whether legal recognition should be made for all purposes or only for specific areas of the law; and the confidentiality of a person's previous sexual identity. The paper particularly analyses the law in the United Kingdom and then considers other jurisdictions before focusing on the treatment of transsexuals under the European Convention on Human Rights.     

The European Gender Equality Index: Conceptual and Analytical Issues

This article presents a composite indicator designed to measure and compare existing structural gender equality in the countries of the European Union. The construction of an index is always a complex task which requires making a great many important conceptual, analytical and empirical decisions. This complexity explains the wide variety of gender equality indices created during the last 25?years. All the proposed indices attempt to measure the same thing, gender (in)equality, but none of them define the concept they want to measure in exactly the same way, nor do they operationalize measurement in the same manner. Taking into account the methodology of these preceding approaches, this article explains the basis for the most important analytical and conceptual decisions made in constructing the European Gender Equality Index. The article also includes the overall scores obtained by the 27 European countries on this index, on its three basic dimensions (education, work and power), and on the eighteen indicators that make up its structure. With this data, corresponding to 2009, an adequate analysis of gender equality in Europe can be established.     

Same-Sex Marriage and Language Appropriation Practices of Lesbians

ABSTRACT

Legal marriage has vacillated between being a private agreement made by two individuals and an agreement of social significance under the state’s control (Nokov, 2008; Smart, 2013). Presently, we are without a definition of marriage that serves our diverse population. The discourse surrounding same-sex marriage in the United States is a topic of interest, as explicit attention to communication in reference to these relationships has rarely been documented (Land & Kitzinger, 2005; Richman, 2014). Using a qualitative framework and semistructured interviews, this study investigated the relationship between marriage equality and its impact on language appropriation for 20 lesbians in varying parts of the United States. Analysis employing grounded theory and constant comparative method indicated that for this sample, access to legal marriage did not serve as a determinant for the adoption of language traditionally associated with marriage. Additionally, it indicated that marriage equality hinges on more than the support of the law.     

Income dynamics in couples and the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation

Several studies have shown that a wife's strong (socio)economic position is associated with an increase in the risk of divorce. Less is known about such effects for cohabiting relationships. Using a unique and large-scale sample of administrative records from The Netherlands, we analyze the link between couples' income dynamics and union dissolution for married and cohabiting unions over a 10-year period. We find negative effects of household income on separation and positive effects of the woman's relative income, in line with earlier studies. The shape of the effect of the woman's relative income, however, depends on the type of union. Movements away from income equality toward a male-dominant pattern tend to increase the dissolution risk for cohabiting couples, whereas they reduce the dissolution risk for married couples. Movements away from income equality toward a female-dominant pattern (reverse specialization) increase the dissolution risks for both marriage and cohabitation. The findings suggest that equality is more protective for cohabitation, whereas specialization is more protective for marriage, although only when it fits a traditional pattern. Finally, we find that the stabilizing effects of income equality are more pronounced early in the marriage and that income equality also reduces the dissolution risk for same-sex couples.     

结婚、生育对工资的影响研究——基于性别工资差距角度

随着技术进步和女性人力资本水平的提高,男性和女性的劳动生产率差异逐渐缩小,但性别工资差距在我国是否缩小?全面开放的"二胎政策"又是否加深了女性就业困境?本文使用CGSS 2015数据,从结婚、生育角度出发,运用工具变量法、分位数回归、Oaxaca-blinder分解等方法考察婚育事件对劳动力工资的影响及其作用机制,探讨婚育视角下的性别工资差距问题,提出相应对策建议以促进性别公平。研究首先通过对城镇劳动力的婚姻状态和生育情况与工资性收入进行实证分析,发现在控制了个人特征、人力资本、职业性质和地区等因素后,性别工资差距仍显著存在且婚育事件拉大了该差距。其中结婚使男女劳动力的工资水平均有所提高,但由于原始工资水平的差异和溢价大小的不同,性别工资差距被拉大;生育使男性工资增长,女性工资缩水,这同样加大了性别工资差距。其次基于分位数回归结果进行Oaxaca-blinder平均工资差异分解,结果显示随着收入的增加,性别工资差距在缩小,但婚姻和生育对此差距的解释力度却越来越大且相对稳定。即低收入群体的工资差距较大,但婚育对该差距的解释力度较小,相反高收入群体的性别工资差距较小,但婚育对该差距的贡献却...     

Same-Sex Couples’ Decisions and Experiences of Marriage in the Context of Minority Stress: Interviews From a Population-Based Longitudinal Study

ABSTRACT

In the emerging context of marriage equality, it is important to explore the reasons for and experience of marriage for long-term same-sex couples, including the role of minority stress. In Wave 3 of the population-based, longitudinal CUPPLES Study we interviewed 21 long-term same-sex couples (14 female, 7 male) who resided in 12 different states and who were legally married. Couple members ranged in age from 37 to 84 and reported being together as a couple from 15 to 41 years. Seven couples lived in states that did not recognize their marriage at the time of the interview. Legal protection and social validation emerged as the two primary domains that captured couples’ lived experiences of marriage. Minority stress experiences emerged in the narratives in the context of couples’ long-term commitment, the availability of civil marriage, and couples’ participation in activist efforts on behalf of marriage equality for themselves and others.     

The Economic Foundations of Cohabiting Couples’ Union Transitions

In recent decades, cohabitation has become an increasingly important relationship context for U.S. adults and their children, a union status characterized by high levels of instability. To understand why some cohabiting couples marry but others separate, researchers have drawn on theories emphasizing the benefits of specialization, the persistence of the male breadwinner norm, low income as a source of stress and conflict, and rising economic standards associated with marriage (the marriage bar). Because of conflicting evidence and data constraints, however, important theoretical questions remain. This study uses survival analysis with prospective monthly data from nationally representative panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 1996–2013 to test alternative theories of how money and work affect whether cohabiting couples marry or separate. Analyses indicate that the economic foundations of cohabiting couples’ union transitions do not lie in economic specialization or only men’s ability to be good providers. Instead, results for marriage support marriage bar theory: adjusting for couples’ absolute earnings, increases in wealth and couples’ earnings relative to a standard associated with marriage strongly predict marriage. For dissolution, couples with higher and more equal earnings are significantly less likely to separate. Findings demonstrate that within-couple earnings equality promotes stability, and between-couple inequalities in economic resources are critical in producing inequalities in couples’ relationship outcomes.     

Bridal pregnancy in earlier rural England further examined

Abstract This paper elaborates the argument of a previous paper (Population Studies, 20, 1966, pp. 233-43). The results of an investigation of the experience of 2,340 brides are broadly similar to those reported earlier: in particular, they confirm that bridal pregnancy was more common in the eighteenth than in the seventeenth century. Evidence is presented to suggest that the sixteenth-century experience was similar to that of the seventeenth, while the nineteenth-century experience was similar to that of the eighteenth. It is argued that bridal pregnancy was the product of a courting convention, rather than of 'betrothal-licence', and that it was not especially common among widows or teenagers. It is incidentally shown that the interval between birth and baptism was very brief in the sixteenth century, but lengthened in later centuries; and that the forbidden seasons for marriage were gradually eroded. Finally, it is suggested that the application of Church discipline in relation to bridal pregnancy could be assessed in the Church Court records.     

Paul Fauchille on the Rights of Emigration and Immigration

International migration is squarely on the present‐day agenda of the international community, as attested by the newly released report of the Global Commission on International Migration (see the Documents section of this issue) and by recurrent controversy over proposals to establish a migration analogue to the World Trade Organization. Conventional assumptions about the prerogatives of national sovereignty come up against universalist views of human rights, the logic of globalization, and, in some measure, the regulative ambitions of international organizations. The last period in which this subject aroused comparable ferment was in the 1920s. At that time the main sources of migrants were not countries of the global “South” but self‐described overpopulated countries in Europe. In May 1924 one such country, Italy, convened what became known as the First International Emigration and Immigration Conference. Held in Rome, the meeting was attended by delegates from 57 countries and the League of Nations. Among its resolutions was an “Emigrants' Charter,” recognizing rights to emigrate and immigrate but with strong provisos. Thus the right to immigrate was subject to restrictions “imposed for economic and social reasons based in particular on the state of the labour market and the necessity of safeguarding the hygienic and moral interests of the country of immigration” (see the Notes on Migration section in Industrial and Labour Information [Geneva], Vol. XI, July‐Sept. 1924, pp. 54–68). A more systematic discussion of these putative rights appeared in an article published a few months earlier by a prominent French jurist, Paul Fauchille, which is excerpted below. The rights to emigrate and to immigrate are seen as broad and fairly symmetrical, able to be limited by a state only by appeal to its own right of self‐preservation. Circumscribing the right to emigrate may seem dated in the light of the blanket provision in Article 13 of the (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” (In Fauchille's extreme case, a state can seek to prohibit the wholesale flight of its population.) However, on immigration, about which the Universal Declaration is silent, “self‐preservation” yields a longer list of grounds for restriction. An issue with contemporary resonance is whether those grounds can include the wish by a state “to prevent a fusion of races which might alter its ethnic character or obliterate its national culture.” Restriction on such a basis would be justified, says Fauchille, only where the intending migrants “belonged to an absolutely different civilisation” and were large in number. Paul Fauchille (1858–1926) was an expert in international law, author of the four‐volume Traité de Droit International Public (8th ed., Paris, 1921–26). He was the founding editor of Revue générale du droit international public and founding director (from 1921) of the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales within the University of Paris. The excerpt below is the major part (subtitled “State and Individual Rights in Theory”) of Fauchille's article “The rights of emigration and immigration,” which appeared in the International Labour Review (Geneva), vol. IX, no. 3 (March 1924), pp. 317–333.     

Educational attainment and the transition to first marriage among Japanese women

I use data from a large nationally representative survey to examine the relationship between women's educational attainment and the timing of first marriage in Japan. The results indicate that later marriage for highly educated women primarily reflects longer enrollment in school, that university education is increasingly associated with later and less marriage, and that the trend toward later and less marriage is occurring at all levels of educational attainment. These findings are consistent, albeit weakly, with the argument that higher education should be negatively associated with marriage only in countries in which gender relations make it particularly difficult for women to balance work and family.