Chilean President promulgates equal marriage law

The Chilean President Sebastian Piñera promulgated on Thursday the law of equality marriage passed this week by Congress, a big step in a conservative country that took decades to enact resisted rules such as divorce and abortion in some cases.

The promulgation took place in one of the courtyards of the government palace in which leaders of organizations that defended the rights of the community were present. LGBTIQ +.

“This is a day to celebrate, it is a historic day,” said Piñera when promulgating the law escorted by Rolando Jiménez, leader of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (MOVILH), and Isabel Amor, president of the Fundación Iguales who works for the full inclusion of sexual diversity. He added that the rule “will allow all children with a father and a mother, with two fathers or with two mothers, to have the same rights and the same protection.”

The ceremony took place just over six months after Piñera surprisingly announced his decision to expedite the equal marriage project, which had been sleeping for four years in Congress.

Amor said that with this law “we will not only be able to marry as anyone in this country does, but we will also be able to recognize a couple of hundred children and adolescents who are legally adrift because they cannot have recognized their bond with both parents or both mothers ”.

The law will be published soon in the Official Gazette and will come into effect 90 days later, towards the end of March 2022. MOVILH said that a recent survey of 1,878 same-sex couples showed that 82.8% of them expect it to come into force by To get married.

Without the impulse of the president to the project, its fate would have been uncertain because the new Congress, which will be installed in March 2022, will have a Senate divided equally between the center-left and the center-right and conservatives, while in the Chamber of Deputies there will be a very slight majority of the center-left.

48 years have passed since a timid protest in April 1973 by a score of people from the LGBTIQ + community who complained in the main square of the Chilean capital about police abuses towards their members, until reaching the present day, in which the law is enacted allowing same-sex couples to marry.

Battles continued in the streets and in Congress – reopened in 1990 after its closure for almost 17 years by the military dictatorship (1973-1990) – until in 1999 consensual sodomy among adults was decriminalized, which was the beginning of a legal advance against discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 2012 another law sanctioned the violation of rights by arbitrary discrimination. That same year, three homosexual couples and MOVILH sued the Chilean State in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for violation of the principle of equality before the law because they were not allowed to marry.

In 2015, the LGBTIQ + community succeeded in having the then socialist president Michelle Bachelet enact the law of a Civil Union Agreement that regulates legal aspects of relationships between partners of the same or different sex. A year later, Bachelet, on behalf of the State, made a commitment to the IACHR and entered a bill on equal marriage in Congress, which he finalized in 2017, six months after the end of his term.

They had to wait another four years until, surprisingly, Piñera announced last June that he would put urgency on the project on marriage between same-sex couples. The initiative was quickly processed in the Senate, which approved it on July 21 last, while the deputies took their time and only on November 23 last sanctioned the project. After some modifications, the initiative was passed into law last Tuesday.