The Constitutional Court has ordered that by December 1 Parliament must amend marriage legislation to legalise same-sex marriages.

In an article in Business Day, Patekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of SA, calls it an ‘embarrassing and divisive task’ and argues that ‘the Constitutional Assembly, which drafted and adopted the Constitution, never contemplated that the provision of unfair discrimination against homosexuals would ever be construed as endorsing same-sex marriages’. He is taken on by Fikile Vilakazi, the advocacy officer at OUT LGBT Well-being, who argues the Constitution drafters knew what they were doing: producing a social contract that would never again allow discrimination against anybody by another person or by the state. Vilakazi says it seems that there is very little understanding of what the Constitution means to South Africans. He writes: ‘SA is a constitutional democracy — the Constitution is our supreme law, our collective values as a nation, our code of conduct. The Bill of Rights was written based on the knowledge of SA’s struggles against segregation and discrimination. Constitutional protections against discrimination are the right of all, including lesbian and gay people.’
Read the Vilakazi view
Read the Holomisa view