You allow us to have sex but say no to marriage: Petitioner on SC verdict

Voicing dissatisfaction with the Supreme Court verdict refusing to accord legal recognition to same-sex marriages, petitioner and LGBTQIA+ activist Harish Iyer said that marriage should not be a heterosexual privilege but an equal right granted to every citizen. Iyer argued that while the court decriminalised homosexuality, not granting them the right to get married goes against the “Bharatiya sanskriti”.

Appearing on The Debate moderated by Republic Media Network Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, Iyer stressed on the fact that marriage should not be a privilege only meant for heterosexual people.

“I think marriage should not be a heterosexual privilege but an equal right granted to every individual regardless of their gender, regardless of their sexual orientation. If the marriage equality verdict didn't give us equal rights, at least it should have created a pathway for us, for civil unions. Rather, what we got was platitudes, beautiful English language, beautiful anecdotes and conversations that were happening over there. We didn't even get a pathway. The syntax was beautiful, the language was beautiful. There was no grammatical error but there was zero pathway to marriage equality or any kind of what is marriage.”

He further noted that marriage is a legal contract for the right to inheritance and medical assistance. “If one of us, if we are in the hospital bed, the other person will have automatically the right to decide what to do with me. We are asking for that basic right. There should have been at least some pathway or some direction to a pathway to some sort of legal recognition of our relationship.”

‘Can have sex, but can't get married?’: Iyer 

Iyer stated that the members of the LGBTQ+ community are also consenting adults.

“Section 377 was struck down in the Navtej Singh Johar verdict. So we can have sex in private. So you're telling us that you can have sex, but you can never get married to each other? I think that goes against Bhartiya Sanskriti more than anything else,” he said.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to give legal recognition to same-sex marriage, saying there was "no unqualified right" to marriage with the exception of those that are recognised by law. A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud observed that it is within Parliament's ambit to change the law for validating such unions. 

“Now that the ball has been thrown in the parliament's court, in the government's listing, we will speak, we will speak to every political party, every elected official. Let me also assure you that we will have conversations with them and we will not just vote them up, we will vote them down. We will bring them down. If you do not stand up with the LGBTQ+ community, you don't stand up with the queer community, we will not vote you up. We will also vote you down. We might be a minority, but we are a strong minority,” Iyer said.