Page:Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie.djvu/74

 Rh cover such socially important areas as domestic violence, estate duty, employment equity, and legislation to promote equality.

While this legislative trend is significant in evincing Parliament’s commitment to its constitutional obligation to remove discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation, and while these statutes are consistent with the judgment of this Court in Home Affairs, the advances continue to be episodic rather than global. Thus, however valuable they may be in dealing with particular aspects of discrimination, and however much their cumulative effect contributes towards changing the overall legal climate, they fall short of what this Court called for in J, namely that comprehensive legislation regularising relationships between gay and lesbian persons was necessary; and that it was unsatisfactory for the courts to grant piecemeal relief to members of the gay and lesbian community as and when aspects of their relationships are found to be prejudiced by unconstitutional legislation.

At the heart of legal disabilities afflicting same-sex life partnerships today, then, is the lack of general recognition by the law of their relationships. The problem does not in fact arise from anything constitutionally offensive in what the common

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