What writer Oscar Wilde called a “mutual misunderstanding”, marriage, is in judicial focus. India’s official stance was long assumed to have been settled by the Special Marriages Act of 1954, which gave a legal nod to voluntary unions of individuals unable or reluctant to marry under religious blessing. By faith, for our majority, matrimony is a sacred bond, and for a minority, a written agreement. That Nehruvian-era law was an opt-in common civil code, and while it’s widely seen as a refuge for inter-faith weddings that are still frowned upon with dismal frequency, India must ensure its consonance with Constitutional freedoms. An insistence on applying it only to an alliance of mutual care and intimacy between a woman and a man would mean being held hostage by gender stereotypes. All it takes is acknowledgement that humans fall in love, an obvious fact, for us to uphold marriage as a right that every one of apt age can exercise, regardless of heteronormative norms that deny the scientific reality of our sexual diversity. Gay marriage needs legal approval for all the reasons that any marital knot does. Universalize the right to marry. Equal risk of mutual goof-ups for all, please.
