Page:Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie.djvu/29

 Rh or executive action resulting in enforced marriages, or oppressive prohibitions on marriage or the choice of spouses, would not survive constitutional challenge.

The way the words dignity, equality and privacy later came to be interpreted by this Court showed that they in fact turned out to be central to the way in which the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage came to be evaluated. In a long line of cases, most of which were concerned with persons unable to get married because of their sexual orientation, this Court highlighted the significance for our equality jurisprudence of the concepts and values of human dignity, equality and freedom. It is these cases that must serve as the compass that guides analysis in the present matter, rather than the references made in argument to North American polemical literature or to religious texts.

Although the Sodomy case, which was the first in the series, did not deal with access to marriage as such, it highlighted the seriously negative impact that societal discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation has had, and continues to have, on gays and same-sex partnerships. It concluded that gay men are a permanent minority in society and have suffered in the past from patterns of disadvantage.

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