Next countries to legalize Gay Marriage? (after Colombia)

[jaichind]

There is a current bill in the ROC legislature to legalize Gay Marriage.  There are cultural conservative blocs within both the ruling DPP and the opposition KMT that are trying to water it down to civil union.  Issue of Gay marriage has become quite controversial despite the fact that Chinese traditions does not really focus on this issue, unlike the Christian tradition.  Somehow opposition seems stronger than expected.  With no real Christian tradition on ROC plus no Chinese traditional symbols to use to oppose Gay Marriage, some are using Nazi symbols as a way to show their opposition.  In a high school parade in Hsinchu County a good portion of a the entire class that were partially mobilized to oppose Gay Marriage decided to parade around in Nazi uniforms as a way to project their view on this.









Of course the high school then came under criticism for allowing this parade and worked overtime to try to erase pictures of this even to no avail.

Of course the ROC public has a history of using Nazi symbols for various commercial activities since there is not the negative sensitively toward the Nazi regime that exists in the West.

[jaichind]

I've recently read some article that many East-Asians (Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans and Japanese) have a strong fetish for Nazi symbols and clothes, even though they are not really Nazis themselves.

This is really weird.

Anyway, what are the polls like in Taiwan on the issue of gay marriage ? And if you happen to know, in China ? I always figured support for it might not be that bad in Taiwan, but I have no clue about China (don't even know if the "opinion" "polls" there are even legitimate) ...

Most ROC polls had a medium sized lead for Marriage legalization for a decade or two now.  That seems to have changed once the bill was brought up and polls has trended toward a slight lead for against legalization.  I suspect it has to do with the women's vote.  The gender gap on ROC has always had women leaning Right.  The women's vote has always leaned toward status quo and stability, including stability of the nuclear family.  It was the ROC women's vote that help create laws that made extra-marital affairs illegal from a civil law point of view meaning the victim spouse can sue the adulterer for breaking up the family.  The ROC wife is very powerful within the nuclear family household and I guess the women's vote views Gay marriage as a threat to the status quo of government backing of the nuclear family.   

[jaichind]

Now that the ROC Legislature introduced the bill for Gay marriage the swing against it in ROC public opinion seems pretty dramatic.    A pro-DPP think tank which also had Tsai approval/disapproval at 38/44 also had Gay marriage support at 38/56 versus 46/45 back in Nov.



 Of course the fact that now the reality of Gay marriage seems much more real much have created this dynamic.  This poll shows a very polarized  ROC population on this as only around 4% had no opinion on this matter.  Both DPP and KMT on paper are "not opposed" to Gay marriage bill but both seems to tread carefully as public opinion turns against it as well as the fact that both DPP and KMT have social conservative factions within their ranks that they do not want to offend.  It could be that the bill just never gets brought up for the third and final reading or gets water down to civil union.  I think what is turning public opinion against this bill is the prospect that all sort of legal documents which would have said "Husband and Wife" or "Father and Mother" now will just say "Couple" and "Parents."