Lawmakers in Chile legalize same sex marriage.

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Lawmakers in Chile on Tuesday legalized same-sex marriage, a landmark victory for gay rights activists that underscores how profoundly the country’s politics and society have shifted in the past decade.

By overwhelming majorities in both chambers, lawmakers put the unions of same-sex couples on par with others, making Chile the 31st nation to allow gay marriage and taking a significant step toward consolidating it as the norm in Latin America.

The vote comes as Chile, long seen as a stable and conservative country in the region, grapples with an urgent demand for sweeping social change from various sectors of society. Millions of Chileans took to the streets in 2019 in protests that culminated in a vote to scrap the Constitution, a document inherited from Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and rewrite the laws that frame the nation.

The moment of reckoning showed how out of touch the political class had been on a broad range of issues, including gay rights, said Rolando Jiménez, one of the leaders of Movilh, a leading gay rights organization in Chile.

“The political class had been deaf, blind and mute regarding a series of matters on which civil society and ordinary Chileans had advanced,” he said.

President Sebastián Piñera, a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, startled the political establishment in June by coming out in favor of such unions. He urged Congress to prioritize passing a bill that had languished for years, ensuring the legislation will be among the last achievements of a turbulent presidency.

The measure will be signed into law at the final stretch of Chile’s polarized presidential race. The vote is on Dec. 19, and the leading candidates — Gabriel Boric, a leftist former student activist, and José Antonio Kast, a far-right former congressman — are bitterly at odds on a vast array of issues, including same-sex marriage.

On Tuesday afternoon, during a meeting with evangelical leaders, Mr. Kast said he disagreed with the new law.

“We respect democracy, but that doesn’t mean we change our convictions,” he said. “For us, marriage is between a man and a woman.”

While the movement for same-sex marriage has advanced slowly in much of the world in recent years, the vast majority of Latin Americans now live in countries where those unions are legal. In some large nations, including Brazil and Mexico, the right has been conferred by the courts.

The fight to extend the right to marriage to same-sex couples in Chile began in September 2010, when César Peralta and Hans Arias, a couple who were raising two children, walked into a government office in Santiago and asked to be married, knowing full well their request would be denied.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/worl ... riage.html


It's legal already in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay. In "socialist" Venezuela and Cuba, same sex marriage and unions are not legal.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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