Page:Fourie v Minister of Home Affairs (SCA).djvu/7

Rh determined the generosity of the protection that the Constitution offered. It was because the majority of South Africans had experienced the humiliating legal effect of repressive colonial conceptions of race and gender that they determined that henceforth the role of the law would be different for all South Africans. Having themselves experienced the indignity and pain of legally regulated subordination, and the injustice of exclusion and humiliation through law, the majority committed this country to particularly generous constitutional protections for all South Africans.

These paradoxes illuminate the significance of the Constitution's promise of freedom from unfair discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. For though oppression on the ground of sexual orientation was not paramount in the scheme of historical injustice, it formed part of it, and the negotiating founders deliberately committed our nation to a course that disavowed all forms of legalised oppression and injustice. Instead of selective remediation of the badges of repression and dishonour, all criteria of unfair discrimination were