Taiwan News: Live-stream debate on marriage equality referendum commenced Nov. 4

If you’re interested in ballot initiatives and their impact on civil rights, there is another referendum on the ballot in Taiwan on November 24. There will be at least 4-5 competing questions regarding LGBT rights, 3 of which will deal with whether or not to legalize same-sex marriage or partnerships, and 2 on whether or not to legalize LGBT-inclusive education in Taiwanese schools. 

This could be as big as #Prop8 in 2008, as one-on-one debates on same-sex marriage have been live-streamed to Taiwanese audiences. One in particular, a debate on Nov. 4 on #Question14 involving a pro-equality member of the Taiwanese Parliament (or “Legislative Yuan”) vs. an anti-marriage equality professor, drew praise from online commenters to the MP for his use of evidence and charts to prove that same-sex marriage does not correlate to declining birthrates. 

All of this only became necessary because the DPP government of Tsai Ing-Wen dragged their feet after Taiwan’s High Court ruled in 2017 that same-sex marriage should be legalized by parliament or automatically within the next two years (despite the DPP campaigning on a platform to legalize marriage equality), and the religious right took advantage of a new referendum law to put anti-LGBT questions on the national ballot during Taiwan’s midterms. LGBT activists put their own competing questions on the ballot before the deadline.