High Court Clears way for gay marriage in Taiwan

Alishan tea farms

Yesterday's verdict of the Constitutional Court (full text) striking down prohibitions on gay marriage was especially moving for me. The verdict was due at 4:00, so I turned on the livestream in my writing class, which is full of very progressive Chinese medicine students. A deep throb of joy ran through us all as the court announced that gay people were full human beings like everyone else. It was a beautiful moment in my life.

China Post summed it up simply:

The Constitutional Court ruled that the Civil Code provisions that do not allow same-sex marriage are unconstitutional and asked the government to amend relevant laws within two years to protect gay couples' rights.

Article 972 of the Civil Code states that an agreement to marry "shall be made by the male and the female parties in their own concord."

Of the 15 justices, 12 were in favor of this interpretation (with one recusal), a stunning figure when you consider that the court has a majority of Ma appointees and the KMT is opposed to gay marriage.

The court's verdict was highly progressive. Not only did it recognize equality of all citizens under the law, as enshrined in Article 7 of the Constitution, it also forthrightly referred to modern medical and social research on homosexuality:

(6) Sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic that is resistant to change. The contributing factors to sexual orientation may include physical and psychological elements, living experience, and the social environment. Major medical associations have stated that homosexuality is not a disease. In our country, homosexuals were once denied by social tradition and custom in the past. As a result, they have long been locked in the closet and suffered various forms of de facto or de jure exclusion or discrimination. Besides, homosexuals, because of the demographic structure, have been a discrete and insular minority in the society. Impacted by stereotypes, they have been among those lacking political power for a long time, unable to overturn their legally disadvantaged status through ordinary democratic process. Accordingly, in determining the constitutionality of different treatment based on sexual orientation, a heightened standard shall be applied.

If only my home country was so progressive. This verdict was also delivered first in English, a first in the nation's history. As soon as I heard the announcement that English would be the language, I thought it might be favorable.

This verdict will redound to Taiwan's credit wherever people long to build loving, human-centered societies. It will be heard in China, where the courts have only limited independence. It will help advance the cause of different people everywhere. Good job, my adopted home.

The President tweeted:

Tsai made her stance in favor of the ruling clear in the first line of the tweet saying, "The law must protect the people's freedom of marriage and right to equality."

She then called on all government agencies to move as quickly as possible to draft legislation for deliberation in the Legislative Yuan, and pass the bills in a "timely manner." Prior to the court's ruling, legislation on same-sex marriage had been bogged down in the legislature for months.

Lastly, Tsai called on everyone in society to show "understanding, tolerance, and respect" of those who hold different opinions from their own. There are a number of groups that oppose same-sex marriage which have staged large-scale rallies over the past year against its legalization. A poll by the Ministry of Justice released in 2015 showed 71 percent of Taiwanese supported marriage equality, while a survey conducted by Trend Survey and Research on behalf of the opposition Kuomintang found 51.7 percent of respondents supported legalizing same-sex marriage, while 43.3 percent disapproved.

Good on several levels -- she didn't dehumanize the opponents of gay marriage even though they have consistently dehumanized gays, and she pointedly asked the legislature to get off its butt and get this passed. Many observers noted that this will provide a shield for legislators who have been dragging their feet. Tsai obviously views herself as the President of everyone in Taiwan. Good on her.

Keep in mind that we do not have gay marriage yet, despite all the celebrating. The Court essentially struck down laws opposing gay marriage, and then gave legislators two years to erect a legal framework for gay marriage. At that point, as I understand it, if the legislature does nothing, gay marriage will be a reality in June of 2019 unless someone changes the Constitution. Couples will simply be able to walk in and register a marriage irrespective of gender. As it should be. But room for compromise mischief remains. As Cole observes in his write-up:

Despite the good news, it could be several months before the legislature turns the amendments into the law of the land, and conservative organizations are expected to escalate their efforts to prevent this from happening. In light of Wednesday’s decision, another option for legislators could be to write a separate piece of legislation permitting civil unions, although this alternative is regarded as discriminatory by many members of the LGBT community and their supporters, who want the same rights, under the same laws, as the rest of the nation’s citizens.

Then with gay marriage the headaches over property, children, and divorce will begin. Why does anyone want to get married? People ask me if I support gay marriage, I say "All marriage should be illegal"... Feeling very Rodney Dangerfield here.

Some people were worried that there might be a move to change the Constitution to prevent gay marriage. Won't happen. First, the KMT made it difficult under the law to get Constitutional change done, and second, that would require legislators to have spines of steel to ram through a change, and most legislators are made of pudding.

Meanwhile the haters were out in full force in opposition to the ruling. BBC refers to these yammerheads as "traditionalists" but there is nothing traditional about their position on gayness and gay marriage, both of which were traditional in Chinese history. Our current anti-gay marriage culture is an aberration of the last couple of centuries, and the anti-gay marriage authoritarian Christianity driving much of the vocal objections here is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon.  J Michael Cole was interviewed in Queerious on the opposition to gay marriage in Taiwan and its relationship to overseas authoritarian Christian movements.

MEDIA: In case you've ever wondered whether BBC was ardently pro-China, just watch how it removes "country" and uses "place" in its updates on gay marriage here. How cowardly is BBC? HongKongFP, based in China, said Taiwan was first country. A net-friend acidly observed of Reuters:

Also bizarre (though not surprising, given past form) that the Reuters report included the totally irrelevant 'which China regards as a renegade province' gambit. WTF does that have to do with a domestic issue like marriage equality? It's like they have OCD: "Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, has a celebrated annual gay pride parade that showcases the vibrancy of its lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community

FURTHER: Ketagalen Media's short report is here.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Will China become less bellicose if it is a democracy?

Because these bugs hover, you can often get shots of them in midair.

I was reading the Taipei Times editorializing on the history textbook issue (quality of editorials has plummeted since J Michael Cole has left) and noticed its stance on the Senkakus:

The Japanese government’s decision that its students should be taught that Dokdo, which is governed by Seoul, and the Diaoyutais, which belong to Taiwan but are governed by Tokyo, all belong to Japan, is untenable legally and in the face of international realities.

Some argue that if China becomes a democracy it will cease to be expansionist. Hmmm... certainly that has not been the case with some other large democracies I could name. But here in Taiwan we have an example of a democratic government in the Chinese cultural sphere -- and the major pro-Taiwan paper writes ahistorical crap like "Taiwan owns the Senkakus". A puny but nominally democratic government, without much military, nevertheless insists on claiming its neighbors' territories, including -- formally -- all of China. Because it thinks it is China. So... how will China behave?

Can the Taipei Times be more critical of these claims?
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Ma-Wang notes -- 2016?

Tea farms on Alishan

Some random thoughts on the Ma-Wang disaster for the KMT. Frozen Garlic wrote....

....The judges have been around a little longer and are less idealistic and more political. This is probably a selection effect, with the politically reliable ones getting promoted. The higher up the court system you go, the more political the court supposedly is. So it isn’t surprising that Ma lost in the lower court. Experience tells us that the higher courts will be more sympathetic to his arguments. Today, right on cue, High Court judges were randomly assigned to the case. Wang had asked for a public lottery, but the court insisted on doing it through a random computer process. Magically, the lead judge is married to a senior KMT figure who actually ran for the legislature under the KMT banner many years ago. The talk shows are abuzz questioning whether the assignment was really random.

Couple of things I'd like to note. First, I think Froze is correct in noting higher court judges are more ideological/political -- a lot of them are older civil servants from the 1980s when entrants into the bureaucracy were vetted to make sure they have properly pro-KMT political views. So the whole system appears biased, and it will take two generations for any such bias to work itself out of the System. I also think the lower court realized its ruling didn't matter, since whatever it said would be appealed. So the Court decided to have a little fun and then kick the case upstairs for its true resolution.

Another issue here is Wang's request for a public lottery for the judge selection. That's pretty much an admission that he strongly suspects the computer system is rigged.

2016 now looms. Wang will be 75 and too old to be a candidate. Wu Den-yi, the Vice President, is not a congenial figure. Hau Long-bin, the mayor of Taipei, got elected in a city where they'd vote for the dead, rotting carcass of a dog on a stick if it were the KMT candidate.

What's interesting is what this case may be saying about the chances of Eric Chu, the younger rising star of the KMT, and Jiang Yi-huah, the current premier. The media started mentioning that Jiang might be a dark horse candidate for 2016 a while back. Chu is half-Taiwanese while Jiang's parents are mainlanders from Fujian. For Deep Blue ideologues like Ma who regard the ROC as "theirs", Taiwanese are inferiors and outsiders. If there really is an ethnic element to this assault on Wang by Ma, it may strengthen Jiang's position among the KMT's mainlander elites as a potential 2016 candidate, who have marginalized powerful Taiwanese like Wu Po-hsiung and Wang Jin-pyng. More practically, Jiang is close to Ma and Ma may further view him as one way Ma can rule Taiwan from beyond the political grave of 2016, if Ma can retain his grip on the KMT. Of course, this is a chain of speculations. I need to find a less potent brand of alcohol....

The letter from THRAC in yesterday's Taipei Times listed out some of the alleged constitutional improprieties:

By reporting to the president and then releasing the transcript at a press conference — without laying any charges — the SID grossly violated laws requiring nondisclosure of its investigations and has confirmed suspicions that it is a political tool of the KMT. There are also questions about the legality and propriety of the wiretap.

....

These actions constituted (to use his words) “improper influence at the highest level,” abuse of the office of president and violation of the separation of powers fundamental to a democracy. Ma then acted in his capacity as KMT chairman to have Wang’s party membership suspended and remove him as a legislator-at-large.

This confusion of Ma’s two roles as president and party chairman looks like a return to the old party-state practices of the KMT.

Third, contempt of the legislature. By using an internal KMT party process to remove its speaker, Ma has seriously violated the rights of the legislature. The speaker of the legislature is elected by its members. The legislature oversees the president. Now Ma has used his power as party chairman to become the overseer of the legislature. This has serious implications for KMT proportional vote legislators who must worry about a party chairman who can remove them so easily.

A vast crisis, now in suspension while the Court rules on it. All of it triggered by Ma's own actions, which he did not have to take.
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Daily Links:

• WSJ with a strong round up of the MaWangMess.
• Economist's round up of the MaWangMess: except for the ridiculous remark about reunification, the write up is great improvement over the hilarious Ma the Bumbler bumblement. But the Economist, strangely, continues to support Ma, who seeks to deliver Taiwan into the orbit of a Communist one-party state, rather than the DPP, which supports an independent capitalist democracy. Well, maybe not so strange, considering the Economist's real values....
• Haha. Suddenly the US can't afford to sell Taiwan F-16s. And so the merry-go-round continues. Nobody wants Taiwan to have F-16s except the DPP government.
• Taiwan seizes 820 kilograms of dolphin meat. Dolphin meat is always available if you know where to ask. 
• Dapu: Miaoli County Chief confronted by protesters. The police parted the crowd for him and let him in to pay his respects to Mr. Chang. However, when protest leaders stopped by the home to visit the body, the police would not let them in. 
• Taiwan dry bulk shipping firms to get boost from China trade.
• The BBC has an article on Taiwan's problems with innovation. Its identification of Taiwan's mom-n-pop management as an obstacle is spot on, but sadly it sees "innovation" solely in terms of a narrow slice of electronics firms. Taiwan's textile, machine tool, bike, sporting goods, and other industries, the lifeblood of the island's industrial heartland in central Taiwan, are ignored in this piece, as they are in so many others. Also, BBC's longtime institutional pro-China stance is especially irksome in this context -- one reason Taiwan firms moved to China was to avoid the kind of upgrading of tech and innovation and management BBC (correctly) advocates here and instead prolong dependence on the old low-wage manufacturing strategies of the 1960-80s. BBC is thus in the position of someone who shoots your parents and then laments the fact that you are an orphan.....

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Ma-Wang Tussle Round Up

Apple Daily has had some wonderful front page illustrations during this Ma-Wang disaster.

I need to go away for a vacation (post below) more often if President Ma is going to melt down like this. What fun!  Some observations, in no particular order:

Let's remember -- this affray is entirely the result of Ma's decisions. Nothing called for him to do anything but make his usual noises about resolving things by the law, the KMT is clean, he is against corruption, etc. He didn't have to go after Wang and spark a political and possibly even constitutional. This crisis is entirely of Ma's making.

The Washington Post reports on Taiwan from...Beijing. An island full of talented and perspicacious writers and observers, and their go-to guy is 3000 kms away. Why not just solicit stories from Moonbase Alpha? Think of the broad scope! Longtime Taiwan specialist John Tkacik pointed out the article's subtle pro-PRC spin in a comment below it:

I detect several pro-China spins in this report, including the subtle assumption that Taiwan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, DPP Legislative Whip Ker and Justice Minister Tseng really are guilty of something. These are political figures that Beijing doesn't trust and would gleefully discredit. And when a Taiwan official tells a WPost reporter calling from Beijing "it's unsafe to talk, we're being monitored," he is probably referring to the Chinese security services' routine monitoring of Foreign Correspondents' telephone calls as much as anything else.

The article even terms the feeling of being watched "paranoia" though the piece is about -- what kind of case? Yes, a case in which the government wiretaps were used to discredit the President's perceived political enemies.

Poll plummet: UDN had Ma at 11% approval. As Ma fell to 9% in at least one poll, people were gleefully digging up Ma's words calling for Chen Shui-bian's resignation when Chen hit 18%, or twice as high as where Ma is now. Ma said back in 2006:

「民調掉到18%以下，人民可以把權力拿回來…」

and the bolded comment below was widely repeated:

當民意已經不支持你, 你的政治責任沒有辦法再承擔的時候, 你就應該知道自己下台, 不要等人來罷免你。一個人要有羞恥, 人家才會尊重

When the opinion of the people no longer supports you, and when you can no longer shoulder your political responsibilities, you should know that you need to step down. Don't wait until someone impeaches you. A person has to have a sense of shame for the people to respect him. - Ma Ying-jeou, June of 2006

Letters from Taiwan, always good, juxtaposed a poll that said the DPP's Tsai is now more trusted to carry out cross strait policies than Ma, and that Ma was at 9.2%

The news report for more than 30 scholars and law professors signing a document saying Ma has crossed a constitutional red line is here. I've placed the text under the READ MORE divider below. Thanks to Ketty Chen for sending it around Facebook. The Constitutionality of Ma's acts is starting to loom; what looked like Ma simply doing something fantastically stupid is slowly blowing up into a constitutional crisis. Civic groups pointed out that by listening to the prosecutor and removing Wang from his position in the legislature, Ma may have committed a constitutional violation.

The Court's reversal of the order expelling Wang from the KMT certainly makes it seem so. That was huge.... (Taipei Times):

The Taipei District Court yesterday ruled in favor of Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng’s (王金平) provisional injunction seeking to retain his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) membership and position as head of the legislature.

The court ruled that Wang would be able to retain his membership and rights as a KMT member after submitting a guarantee of about NT$9.38 million (US$314,300), Taipei District Court spokesperson Lai Chien-yi (賴劍毅) told reporters.

The KMT plans to appeal, so stay tuned. FocusTW explains the Court's logic.

The panel of three judges granted Wang's request on the basis of avoiding "irreparable damages" that the plaintiff would suffer due to a loss of eligibility to serve in the Legislature while waiting for a court to rule on his other lawsuit.

Motives? Lots of people are pointing to simple hate. Lee Yuan-tseh, Taiwan's nobel prize-winning physicist, criticized Ma for constantly having his features distorted by hate. Nathan Batto over at the awesome Frozen Garlic has a marvelously informative blog post on the whole affair, well worth reading. He is leery of identifying a motive. All politics may be local in some places, but in East Asian Confucian societies, all politics is personal. I'm with the vendetta believers, though I am sure the politics of the moment, and of the future (particularly Ma's prized cross-strait peace plan) may have played a role. I don't think Ma is playing 11-dimensional chess or is all that impatient with what's going on in the legislature; I think he seized a chance to revenge himself on someone he really just totally hated. Like a sort of inept, out of control Michael Corleone, he's taking revenge on everyone who offended him by opposing him: the jailing of Chen Shui-bian, the investigation of Lee Teng-hui for embezzling (handled by the same prosecutor who went after Wang in this case), the investigation of Su Tseng-chang for his handling of government papers, the attack on Wang, the prosecutions of DPP politicians all over the island, etc etc etc.

The China Times says Ma sacrifices Taiwan's Future by Slaying Wang. The China Times also pointed out that Lin Yi-shih, the Ma associate who was recently given six years for corruption, is still a KMT party member.

Jonathon Manthorpe, longtime observer of things here, has a write-up of events here.

Lighter moment: some delegation went to Washington to complain to people there about Taiwan's Watergate -- illegal wiretapping! Bwahahaha. Don't they read the news? Complaining to Washington about someone engaged in illegal wiretapping is like complaining to the Mafia about what horrors illegal prostitution and gambling are.
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Daily Links:

• Jamestown Brief piece assesses the DPP's China policy in light of the 2014 elections
• Taiwan military delays volunteer service by two more years.
• NYTimes: Taiwan seeks to revive its banana industry
• Rex How analyzes the reasons Ma wanted a debate with the DPP over the services pact. One tactic the KMT uses is to reduce all conflicts over X to a partisan conflict between the pro-China and pro-Taiwan forces. 
• Taiwan looks to poach Malaysian students to offset China brain drain .