At Least They Haven’t Solved Health Care, Too
Posted on | November 14, 2006
The South African parliament legalized gay marriage this week:
The bill, unprecedented on a continent where homosexuality is taboo, was decried by gay activists for not going far enough and by opponents who warned it “was provoking God’s anger.”
Veterans of the governing African National Congress praised the Civil Union Bill for extending basic freedoms to everyone under the spirit of the country’s first post-apartheid constitution, adopted a decade ago by framers determined to make discrimination a thing of the past.
“When we attained our democracy, we sought to distinguish ourselves from an unjust painful past by declaring that never again shall it be that any South African will be discriminated against on the basis of color, creed, culture and sex,” Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula declared.
South Africa’s constitution was the first in the world to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, providing a powerful legal tool to gay rights activists even though South Africa remains conservative on such issues.
That’s right. America lags behind South Africa in civil rights.
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2 Responses to “At Least They Haven’t Solved Health Care, Too”
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November 14th, 2006 @ 11:16 pm
But John, since they overturned apartheid, I think they’ve been working very hard on civil rights issues. It doesn’t surprise me that they’d pass a law like this.
November 15th, 2006 @ 10:46 am
Yeah. The majority of South Africa’s population still remembers being on the wrong end of Jim Crow, and worse. That they should resolve to do better shouldn’t really surprise us, but we have reason to feel shame.