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Indian Supreme Court’s Refusal to Legalize Same-Sex Marriage: Impact on LGBTQ+ Rights

(CTN News) – Three bodies were found in the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad, a large city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, in the summer of 2018.
As well as Asha’s three-year-old daughter, two women, ages 30 and 28, had taken their own lives. The two girls scribbled a note in red lipstick on a wall by the river before they jumped in.
The inscription said, “We are leaving the world which will never allow us to be one,” in Gujarati.
Both of the ladies had settled down with men and started families. Later, authorities discovered that they had met at the same workplace. Their family frequently fought once their friendship grew romantic.
They planned to make a lifelong commitment to one another. However, they were not permitted to do so by society or the law.
The news of the two women’s deaths shocked 25-year-old Rohin Bhatt, a student at the National Law University in Gujarat. He felt a tremor in his moral compass.
Five years later, Bhatt was one of the leading proponents arguing for the legalization of same-sex marriages before India’s Supreme Court, which last week declined to rule on the subject in a “heartbreaking setback” for the LGBTQ community.
The five-judge bench led by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud acknowledged that the LGBTQ community faces discrimination from the state, but it refused to engage in “judicial lawmaking” on same-sex marriage, stating that the issue was beyond the court’s purview and should be taken up by the Indian Parliament. It also found that gay couples who are not married should not be allowed to adopt.
For the LGBTQ community in India, this verdict was a major setback. Many people were counting on the Supreme Court to finally let them marry the person they love.
We have been told that we do not merit full citizenship. We are unable to wed for legal reasons. Bhatt told Al Jazeera that “the buck has been passed to the government,” which is “hostile to queer rights.” As a lawyer and a queer person, I am personally affected by this ruling.
Last year, Bhatt and his partner, who wished to remain anonymous, met on Twitter (now X).
That first glance sealed the deal. We both indeed want to tie the knot, but we’re in a bind,” he told Al Jazeera.
At this point, everything is bound to change. It’s not just about getting hitched. It’s about the diversity of rights that spring up as a result of being acknowledged. People today gaze at us and treat us unfairly.
To us, people talk nonsense. A large number of solicitors pleaded these points of discrimination in court. However, the court ultimately decided against us.
Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code made it illegal to be a homosexual in India. This regulation was passed down from the British, who controlled India until 1947.
Consensual homosexual sex between adults has been illegal in India since 2001, when the Naz Foundation, an HIV/AIDS and sexual health charity, petitioned the Delhi High Court to change the law. The Supreme Court declared Section 377 unconstitutional in 2009.
Unfortunately for the LGBTQ community, in 2012 the Supreme Court reversed the Delhi High Court’s judgement.
However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government argued before the Supreme Court that the demand for marriage equality was a “urban elitist” concept that had no place in a court of law in its objection to same-sex marriages.
When asked how same-sex marriages compared to the “Indian family unit concept of a husband, a wife, and children,” the administration responded that they did not.
The ideological foundation of Modi’s BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was ecstatic over the Supreme Court’s ruling minutes after it was announced.
Another extreme Hindu group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), expressed “satisfaction” with the court’s decision that marriage between two homosexuals did not qualify for registration.
They have no such right under the Constitution. The VHP statement also lauded the decision to deny gays the chance to adopt a child.
Pooja Kumari (not her real name out of concern for her safety) is 25 years old and originally from the Bhiwani region of the northern Indian state of Haryana. She told Al Jazeera that same-sex relationships are especially fraught in rural parts of India.
You have no idea how challenging it is to justify my behavior to others. Women and men in the countryside only know how to do one thing: get married and have children. “In their eyes, my background means nothing,” she explained.
Kumari is an urban dweller of western India, far from her own relatives.
My more educated older sister has a vague notion of my sexual orientation. Because I am a woman, I have been told, I must eventually marry a male. Marriage offers are made to them for me. So, what do I say to them? No one backs me up. She explained that she only received encouragement from the LGBT community.
Nitin Karani, a 52-year-old bank executive in Mumbai, was mentioned in Bhatt’s plea to the Supreme Court.
In 2019, Karani wed New York City consultant Thomas Joseph. They had argued for the Special Marriages Act of 1954, which permits marriage between people of different religions or castes in India, to recognize their marriage or to allow them to remarry.
However, the Court has stated that it cannot create laws but “only interpret it and give effect to it.”
The court ruled that if it “reads down” or “inserts words into the Special Marriage Act to give marriage rights to members of the LGBTQIA+ community,” it would be going into the legislative domain.
Many LGBTQ people feel “left at the mercy” of Modi’s governing BJP at this point.
Everyone knows the government doesn’t care about giving us these freedoms. Not even a committee has been formed. Is there any chance? This is what Karani remarked.
Anish Gawande, a 27-year-old activist, is the founder and director of Pink List India. His organization tracks the steps that politicians in India have taken to support the LGBTQ community.
The truth is, this battle has only intensified. It’s not really clear what needs to happen next. Which ones of them do we approach first? The court has failed to do its job. Bread was on the menu today. They haven’t even left us a scrap of bread,” he complained.
“It’s important to realise that a slew of other liberties accompanies the freedom to wed. When a couple gets married, they have more protection from their relatives and the law than they did before. Marriage is more than just a social status symbol.
As a bonus, it shields the helpless from harm. The denial of this safeguard affects the most vulnerable members of society and is a far larger problem.
One of the petitioners before the Supreme Court, Rituparnah Borah, director of the queer feminist resource group Nazariya, told Al Jazeera that LGBTQ rights “do not start or end with marriage.”
The point of life is not marriage. Safety from harm is… They need to pass legislation against discrimination, she remarked.
Our petition was about much more than that, though. The film also addressed the issue of homophobic violence within straight families. Unless there is legislation protecting us from discrimination, being married won’t alleviate our difficulties.
The next day after the ruling, lawyer Utkarsh Saxena and PhD student Ananya Kotia got married in front of the Supreme Court building in New Delhi. Kotia posted a picture to Instagram of Saxena proposing to him on one knee.
Yesterday was painful. Utkarsh Saxena and I returned to the court that ruled against us today and legally married each other by exchanging rings. According to the photo’s caption, “this week wasn’t about a legal loss but our engagement.”

News
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.
According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.
Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.
Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.
Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.
To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.
Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.
On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.
Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.
TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.
When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.
And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.
Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.
A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.
Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.
But today, it feels more like reality.
Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.
SOURCE | CNN
News
2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Washington — Trump Media, The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.
The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.
The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.
The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.
Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.
Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.
The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.
The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.
SOURCE | AP
News
The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.
The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.
Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.
This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.
In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.
The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.
This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.
The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.
In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.
According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.
Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.
The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.
For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.
Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.
As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.
As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.
The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.
SOURCE: AP
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