Same Sex Marriage / Marriage Equality- Supreme Court Hearing-LIVE UPDATES

Singhvi: "By excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage, the State declares that it is legitimate to differentiate between their commitments and the commitments of heterosexual couples."

Singhvi: Civil union is not marriage. Please see the judgement of Lewis v Harris.

Singhvi: Civil union is not a solution, not an equal alternative. Civil unions do not address the constitutional anomaly presented by exclusion of non-heterosexual couples from the institution of marriage.

Singhvi: When it comes to the use of gendered terms to specifically address gendered imbalances of power and therefore achieve substantive equality, limiting such terms to their gendered, heterosexual, context is what is consistent with the law’s underlying thrust

Singhvi: The Petitioners are not seeking interpretation of every gendered word in the SMA in a gender-neutral way. We are only assail those parts of the SMA that require a constitution-compliant reading on grounds of discrimination.

Singhvi: Till the right of non- heterosexual couples to marry under the HMA is adjudicated upon by this Court or provided for by the legislature, non- heterosexual marriages simply do not meet the preconditions for the triggering of Section 21A.

Singhvi: It would not follow from this approach that non-hetero Hindu couples who marry under the SMA would be excluded from legal succession regimes altogether. Like non-Hindu they are governed by the ISA. 

Singhvi: It is not a perfect world. We now down that there are angularities. But my submission is that these angularities are those that my lords have in the past surmounted.

CJI DY Chandrachud: Dr Singhvi, since yesterday we've been getting too many things on the electronic mode. Justice Bhat called it an electronic dump. We're in rejoinder now.

Dr AM Singhvi: I'm not the culprit