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Will Same Sex Marriage Be Coming To Thailand Soon?

Transcript of the above video:

Hello. My name is Benjamin Hart. I am an American Attorney and the Managing Director of Integrity Legal, here in Bangkok, Thailand.

We have been doing videos on this channel with respect to the issue of same-sex marriage for some time now and with the creation or probable creation of a coalition here in Thailand and the Parliament coming “online” if you will here in coming weeks, it seemed kind of logical to do another video, especially in light of a recent article from Khaosod English that is khaosodenglish.com. The article is titled: MP says Gay Marriage Bill on the Horizon. Quoting directly: "A newly elected lawmaker on Thursday pledged to gather support in Parliament for a same-sex marriage law. Future Forward's Tanwarin Sukkhapisit said a gay marriage bill is part of her party's policy reform and that she will try to convince other MPs to make it a reality.  Tanwarin is one of several LGBT politicians who spoke at a Thursday panel to mark the International Day against homophobia, transphobia and biphobia or IDAHOT. “It won't take long” said Tanwarin, a former filmmaker. She said Future-Forward showed its commitment to LGBT issues by listing her among its top 10 party list MP candidates and added that four of the party's 80 MPs are openly LGBT. 

Now this is interesting because this comes on the heels of the National Legislative Assembly under the last Government here in Thailand had already promulgated a same-sex civil union’s bill. It remains to be seen what exactly the status of that bill is as of the time of this video but there seems to be rather broad base support to go ahead and get some kind of legislation which would further equalize rights with respect to LGBT folks as opposed to different sex marriages to go ahead and provide more equalization be it a civil union Bill or a full same-sex marriage Bill. I don't know exactly how that's going to shake out.  But that being said, the last government, which was in my opinion arguably more conservative than the Future Forward Party, seemed to at least be somewhat in favor of this as they managed to promulgate a Bill on it and brought it before the Cabinet. 

Now that we are seeing more for lack of better term in a classical sense more folks on the more liberal side of the spectrum coming into Government Office and they are now supporting this, I think it's fairly safe to presume we are probably going to see some kind of legislation that would provide at least some further equalization for same-sex couples in the LGBT community with respect to civil unions or marriage at least sometime in the relatively near future as there appears to be for lack of better term bipartisan the wrong word that is one we generally use in America, as this is a multi-party system but there appears to be more broad-based support for this initiative than for others that are perhaps on the books. I think we could see it sometime relatively soon.

It remains to be seen and of course as soon as something changes materially will do another video on this channel.