Hong Kong lawmakers vote against expanding same-sex couple rights, in blow to equality

CNN:

With their home city Hong Kong unable to honor their wish to get married, Dino Wong and his boyfriend Geoffrey Yu flew more than 2,000 miles across the ocean to Guam to tie the knot in 2019.

The trip wasn’t cheap – $5,000 just for the return flights, two nights of accommodation and the registration fee – but it was the best option they could find, with Hong Kong not recognizing same-sex marriage.

It wasn’t their dream wedding – they exchanged vows in the corridor of a nondescript government building on the western Pacific island, without the presence of parents and guests.

There was a post-wedding party later in Hong Kong, but their marriage has never been officially recognised at home, something Wong had always hoped would happen.

But his hopes were dashed on Wednesday when Hong Kong’s legislature voted down a proposed same-sex partnerships bill that would have seen the city become the fourth place in Asia to recognize same-sex marriages, after Taiwan, Nepal and Thailand.

Hong Kong, which markets itself as “Asia’s World City” and China’s financial gateway to the world, decriminalized homosexuality in 1991 but has yet to recognize same-sex marriage or legislate against discriminations based on sexual orientation grounds.

Under the proposed bill, same-sex couples married overseas would have been able to register their marriage in Hong Kong and be granted rights to hospital visits and to make medical decisions on behalf of a spouse, as well as claiming their partner’s body or deciding where their loved one should be buried. It still didn’t afford same-sex couples full equality, but Wong and many others in the community saw it as a step forward.

The former British colony is generally more open-minded on LGBTQ issues compared to mainland China, where discussion of such topics is heavily policed by authorities.

But following the “patriots-only” elections framework, imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing in 2021 after huge and sometimes violent democracy protests, its legislature is now without pro-democracy lawmakers who had tended to align their stance with LGBTQ activists.