Activists and academics are outraged by the ”farcical and offensive” way Parliament dealt with same-sex marriages this week.
During submissions to the home affairs portfolio committee on the Civil Union Bill, members asked people who appeared before the committee questions such as ”What is gay?”, ”How do two men have sex with each other?” and ”How do two women have a baby together?”.
”The atmosphere generally was extremely homophobic,” said Jonathan Berger, who made a submission to the committee on behalf of the Equality project.
”One would think that the chair would stick to the terms of reference and concentrate on the form of marriage and not ask questions about what happened to Sodom and Gomorra.”
Fatima Hassan, a senior lawyer who attended the hearings, deplored ”the attitude and comments towards gay and lesbian people in the room. I have never been more embarrassed to be South African.”
She said that, as a Muslim woman who is not gay, she was ”hurt and offended by the gist of the hearings”, which displayed ”clear bigotry and ignorance”.
The Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) surprised most with its strong support for a single law for all marriages including same-sex unions. However, Cardinal Wilfred Napier of the Catholic Church focused most of his submission on the condemnation of homosexuality and called gays and lesbians deviant and unnatural.
Pierre de Vos from the University of the Western Cape’s law department said the hearings were at times chaotic and embarrassing.
”I laughed at some of the things that committee members asked and said, but only because the constitutional judgement is on the side of gay people. What really astounded me was that the members of the committee had no idea what their brief was.”
Hassan also said, ”Our representatives in Parliament fail to understand their mandate, the Constitution, what a constitutional democracy means and the powers of the Constitutional Court.”
The Constitutional Court left the portfolio committee very little room to manoeuvre. The only issue the committee had to discuss was how Parliament should extend protection for same sex relationships in a way that provides equal rights and status to those enjoyed in heterosexual marriages.
In 2002 the Constitutional Court ruled that same sex couples could adopt children.
”For committee members to now come and ask ‘But what about the children?’ is like trying to close the door once the horse has already bolted,” said De Vos. ”Committee members were also ignorant that our own Parliament changed the definition of marriage already in 1998 and extended this to include polygamous customary marriages. For eight years it has not been defined as a union only between a man and woman and the committee members did not seem to know this.”
Asked about these features of the hearings, committee chairperson Hlomane Chauke said, ”Why do you have this negative view? Nobody raised these negative points with me in the committee and I will deal with your questions in our report.”
He maintained that all the committee members ”understood their brief completely”, and said he asked about Sodom and Gomorra because he had no idea what people were talking about when they referred to this.