ABOUT 500 people marched around Manila's Rizal Park on Saturday, many carrying placards and streamers saying "Fight for Love" and waving rainbow banners.
Jonas Bagas, executive director of the pro-LGBT rights group TLF Share, said the US court ruling "will reverberate in other corners of the world." The rally was to commemorate the 1969 demonstrations in New York that started the gay rights movement globally. Bagas said that in the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines, where the church has fiercely opposed gay marriages, he expects the "conservative majority" to continue to block human rights for LGBTs. "We hope that after this decision, the struggle for equality can be reframed to go beyond marriage equality so that we can address other dehumanising situations that LGBTs encounter," he said. Same-sex unions are not legally recognised in the Philippines because the country's civil code limits marriages to a man and a woman. A gay lawyer, Jesus Nicardo Falcis III, has challenged the constitutionality of the civil code provision on marriage, saying the constitution does not define marriage solely as between a man and a woman and the family code does not require a married couple to have children or the ability to procreate. Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said in a statement that the church would continue teaching that marriage "is an indissoluble bond of man and woman." He said, however, that the church won't discriminate against LGBTs. The church will study the US court's decision "with assiduousness, and revisit our concepts and presuppositions, always with an eye to being faithful to the Gospel and to the mission of the Church," Villegas said.
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