A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud is hearing a batch of pleas seeking legal sanction for same-sex marriage. It began hearing the matter on Tuesday and the arguments remained inconclusive on the third consecutive day on Thursday. The arguments will resume on April 24.
Hence, before proceeding ahead on this subject, the honorable Supreme Court should have taken the opinion of the religious leaders, people from the field of medicine, social scientists, and academicians by forming a committee, he told reporters here. Jain said the subject of marriage is governed by different civil codes.
None of the civil codes prevailing in India gives permission for this (same-sex marriage). Does the Supreme Court want to make a change in these? he said. Ram Narayan Dwivedi of Kashi Vidvat Parishad, Govind Sharma of Ganga Mahasabha, and Mahant Balak Das of Dharma Parishad also spoke at the press conference. During Thursday’s hearing, the Supreme Court did not agree with the contention that, unlike heterosexuals, same-sex couples cannot take proper care of their children.
Referring to its 2018 judgment that decriminalized consensual gay sex, the court said it led to a situation where two consenting homosexual adults can live in a marriage-like relationship and the next step could be to validate their relationship as a marriage. Therefore, by decriminalizing homosexuality we have not just recognized the relationship between consenting adults of the same gender, we have also recognized implicitly the fact that the people who are of the same sex could be in a stable relationship, it said.
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