{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021910604732690624, 'fraction_numerical': 0.014899211218229623, 'mean_word_length': 5.274725274725275, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Constitutional Challenges to Sexual Orientation Discrimination

1999 may well go down in history as a watershed in the legal struggle for gay and lesbian equality. While in the late 1990s many legislatures across the world extended various statutory benefits to same-sex relationships,1 most legal systems continue to make a clear statutory distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex couples (usually by ignoring the former completely), as well as the more obvious (and deliberate) distinction between married and unmarried couples. Both distinctions have come under increasing challenge and in 1999 decisions from each of the highest courts in Canada, South Africa and Vermont, U.S.A. held legislation to be unconstitutional which treated same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex couples. In that year too, the British House of Lords held that a same-sex couple could be a “family” for certain statutory purposes,2 and the European Court of Human Rights for the first time accepted that the prohibition of discrimination contained in Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights covered sexual orientation discrimination.3