Japanese high court rules same-sex
marriage ban is unconstitutional
Dec. 13 (UPI) -- Japanese law prohibiting same-sex marriage from being officially recognized is unconstitutional, the country's Fukuoka High Court ruled on Friday.
The decree marks the third time a Japanese high court has ruled in a similar manner.
Japan's legal system includes eight high courts including Fukuoka, which fall below the Supreme Court of Japan.
A total of 35 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit contesting the legality and constitutionality of Japanese laws enshrined in the county's Civil Code.
This past March, the Sapporo High Court upheld a 2021 lower court decision that found that a lack of protection for same-sex marriages violated the Constitution of Japan.
The Tokyo High Court in October ruled the same way, becoming the second body to do so.
Friday's ruling by the Fukuoka High Court found Japanese civil laws currently in place that prohibit marriage and recognition of same-sex couples, violate parts of the constitution that guarantee equality of both sexes.
"There is no longer any reason to not legally recognize marriage between same-sex couples," Presiding Judge Takeshi Okada said Friday following the ruling.
And he is right, in a godless country!
Japan currently does not permit same-sex marriage or offer any legal protection or recognition for LGBTQ couples, making it the only member of the Group of Seven nations in that regard.
It's not yet clear if legislators will seek to appeal the decision to Japan's supreme court.
Japan's federal government will monitor the situation, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters Friday following the court ruling.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was elected last month and has publicly expressed support for LGBTQ marriage.
Canadian mayor fined for LGBT thought crime of refusing to bend over
The mayor of the Canadian township of Emo (pop: 1,204), which borders the US state of Minnesota, has to personally pay an LGBTQ group $5,000 for injury to their self-respect. And that’s on top of the $10,000 that the town has to fork over.
According to official documents, the drama started in 2020 when Borderland Pride, a Canadian non-profit group, requested that the town officials officially recognize Pride Month in June of that year. The town had done so in previous years, but reportedly decided to amend their proclamations policy – which had yet to be adopted when this latest request came through. So the group’s request was rejected in a 3-2 council vote that year.
It’s not like this particular policy amendment was high priority, particularly at the height of the Covid fiasco, since they barely had any requests anyway. This one group alone represented half of all of the town’s requests for declarations, proclamations, or flag displays from April 2019 to April 2020.
Their request for the town to fly the rainbow flag for a week, and to send the group photos of it with the town’s officials for use on social media, reportedly wasn’t considered since the town didn’t even have a flagpole.
So here comes a complaint by the group to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal – which was decided on November 20, 2024.
The role of such tribunals across Canada is to deal exclusively with complaints about discrimination on the basis of prohibited factors like race, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and criminal convictions. Because if actual courts had to deal with things like this, they’d be clogged up like a frat house toilet after Frosh Week. If the complainant can prove that there was at least a 50 percent chance of discrimination on one of these bases, then it can order cash awards and other remedies. So step right up! Take a spin! Win cash and prizes!
In the case of Borderland Pride against the Township of Emo, the tribunal accepted at face value that the council didn’t consider hanging the flag because of its lack of a flagpole. It did however note that the flag could have been “displayed” somewhere else other than on a flagpole. But it stopped short of ordering the mayor to walk around with it like a Superman cape.
The tribunal also accepted that two of the three council votes against issuing the Pride Month proclamation occurred in good faith and were merely the result of not wanting to adopt any proclamations before the new policy governing them was put into place. It was only the mayor’s “no” vote that was problematic.
During the council meeting in question, after discussing what they should do with the Pride flag display request in the absence of a flagpole, but before the vote against the Pride Month proclamation, Mayor Harold McQuaker said, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin…there’s no flags being flown for the straight people.”
Uh oh, here’s comes the forbidden-thinking patrol!
The tribunal ruled that the mayor’s comment was “dismissive of Borderland Pride’s flag request and demonstrated a lack of understanding of the importance to Borderland Pride and other members of the LGBTQ2 community of the Pride flag” and constitutes discrimination.
Right about now, I have to ask, "Are there any members of Borderland Pride living in Emo?"
Suddenly, because of the mayor’s pro-heterosexual comments, it must mean that he hates gays. So it’s decided that “on the preponderance of evidence,” the rejection of the Pride proclamation was, more likely than not, the end-result of the mayor’s homophobia, and couldn’t be because he aligned with the other two Council “no” votes on the need for the policy amendment to deal with it first.
“I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “We just don’t have a flagpole at our town hall,” McQuaker recently told the Toronto Sun. But cognitive deviance is cognitive deviance, and like a colon polyp, best to nip it in the bud so there’s zero risk of it ever potentially developing into systemic cancer.
So here come the experts to tell the tribunal about how malignant this mayor’s thinking already is.
According to Dr. Emily Saewyc, an LGBTQ specialist who testified at the hearing, research suggests that “anti-LGBTQ rhetoric by President Trump, Vice-President Pence, and members of Trump’s cabinet during his presidency visibly increased the amount of hate and violence” towards these minorities. Or, you know, maybe people are just fed up with having special interest agenda shoved down their throats in make-work projects for activists at a time when citizens of all stripes are facing common and federating hardships. She then attempted to draw a parallel with the “homophobic and hateful social media posts about Borderland Pride and the LGBTQ2 community” after the vote – as though people would have been cheering the LGBTQ cause had the mayor not been such a bigot and supported Pride Month.
Right, because the key to people embracing wokeism is just to firehose even more of it into the public domain. Guess she hasn’t heard about the impact on brands like Bud Light and Jaguar after going woke. Or the public outcry after the Paris Olympics opening ceremony featuring what many interpreted as being a tranny wreck version of the Last Supper.
Borderland Pride wanted the tribunal to allow it to choose a week for the Township to have 2020 Pride Month now, and to force it to hold Pride Month every June going forward. It refused. But it did order Mayor McQuaker to attend a sort of re-education camp. Within 30 days, he has to provide Borderland Pride with proof that he’s completed the province’s human rights training course.
McQuaker has basically told the tribunal to shove it, refusing to pay or take the course, calling it “extortion,” according to the Toronto Sun.
A mayor of a township in Ontario, Canada, reportedly had his personal bank account garnished after he refused to pay a $5,000 fine after a tribunal ruled he had discriminated against an LGBTQ group. Fox News
All of this is the sort of blueprint that demonstrates exactly how special interest agendas end up hijacking the most basic aspects of daily life, through relentless activist browbeating that has a chilling effect on anyone who fails to passionately cater to their sacred cows.
