Singapore: The Bedroom Was Opened and the Definition Was Sealed

On 29 November 2022 the Parliament of Singapore passed two Acts. The first, the Penal Code (Amendment) Act 2022, does its work in one operative sentence: Section 377A of the Penal Code 1871 is repealed. That section had made any act of gross indecency between men, in public or in private, punishable by up to two years. The second, the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore (Amendment No. 3) Act 2022, inserted a new Article 156 immediately after Article 155. Both Acts were assented to on 27 December 2022. Both came into force on 3 January 2023.

Read from outside, the pairing invites one of two conclusions, and most foreign accounts reach for one of them within a paragraph. The first is hypocrisy: a government that has just conceded that gay men are not criminals immediately building a wall to make sure the concession goes no further. The second is more generous and more common — that this is a first step, a country moving at its own pace along a road whose destination everybody already knows. Half a loaf. Not there yet.

This essay argues that both readings are wrong, and that the second is the more interesting error, because the people who make it do not notice they are making a claim. The chamber’s reason for spending an essay on Singapore is not that its answer is unusual. It is that Singapore did in public, in a single sitting, with reasons given at length, what most states do implicitly and never have to defend: it separated what it forbids from what it declines to interfere with from what it makes arrangements for, and then said which institution is allowed to move the third. That separation deserves to be stated at full strength before anyone says what it costs. It does cost. The cost is specific, it is bounded, and in Singapore it can be measured at an address.

Precision matters here more than usual, because the most widely repeated summary of what Singapore did is not what Singapore did. Article 156 is not a definition of marriage. It does not say that marriage is between a man and a woman. Its first clause states that the Legislature may by law define, regulate, protect, safeguard, support, foster and promote the institution of marriage. Its second says that the Government and public authorities may do the same in the exercise of executive authority. The operative clauses are the third and the fourth, and they are written in the negative: nothing in Part 4 invalidates a law, or an exercise of executive authority, by reason that it defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, or is based on such a definition.

Part 4 of the Constitution is the chapter headed Fundamental Liberties. It runs from Article 9 to Article 16 and contains, among others, liberty of the person, equal protection before the law, freedom of speech, assembly and association, and freedom of religion. Article 156 therefore does not say what marriage is. It says which arguments cannot be used to unmake it. It removes a route.

The definition itself stayed exactly where it had been. It sits in ordinary statute — in the Women’s Charter 1961, whose section 12 provides that a marriage solemnised in Singapore or elsewhere between persons who at the date of the marriage are not respectively male and female is void, and in the Interpretation Act, which the Prime Minister named alongside it when he explained the plan. Neither is entrenched. Either could be amended by an ordinary majority in the same chamber that passed the constitutional amendment. What Article 156 did was not to make the answer permanent. It was to decide who is allowed to change it, and to take the courts off that list.

That is a jurisdictional instrument rather than a moral one, and reading it correctly changes what there is to argue about. A reader who believes Singapore wrote its family into the Constitution will argue about the family. A reader who sees what was actually written will argue about institutions, which is the argument Singapore says it was having.

The sequence began in a courtroom. On 28 February 2022 the Court of Appeal decided a set of consolidated challenges to Section 377A. It did not rule on whether the provision violated Articles 9, 12 or 14. It held instead that representations made by the Attorney-General and by the Government, to the effect that the provision would not be proactively enforced against consenting adult men in private, gave rise to a legally protected expectation, and that Section 377A was in consequence unenforceable in its entirety absent some further announcement. Because no prosecution was in prospect, the appellants had no live controversy for the court to decide, and the constitutional questions were left where they were found.

Six months later, at the National Day Rally of 21 August 2022, the Prime Minister gave two reasons for repeal and they are worth keeping apart. The first was a statement of principle: from the national point of view, private sexual behaviour between consenting adults does not raise any law-and-order issue, and there is no justification to prosecute people for it or to make it a crime. The second was a risk assessment: following the Court of Appeal’s judgment, the Minister for Law and the Attorney-General had advised that in a future challenge there was a significant risk of the provision being struck down on equal-protection grounds, and it would be unwise to ignore that.

It follows that the repeal did not change anyone’s exposure to prosecution, which was already close to nothing and had been for fifteen years. What it changed was status. A person whose conduct is unenforceably criminal and a person whose conduct is not criminal are in different positions even when neither is ever charged, and it is not sentimental to say so; the Prime Minister said as much when he hoped the change would provide some relief. But the same judgment that made repeal prudent also showed the Government what a constitutional challenge could do next, and the second Act is the answer to that. The route that had nearly taken Section 377A was the route that would have been used on the definition of marriage. So the route was closed.

Here is the argument at its strongest, stated without hedging, because a weak version would prove nothing.

A state can do three different things about a kind of life. It can forbid it. It can decline to interfere with it. It can make arrangements for it — build it into the law of property, inheritance, adoption, immigration, tax and housing, and thereby distribute goods through it. Most public argument in Europe, North America and Japan runs the second and third together, so that a state which does not provide is assumed to be halfway to forbidding. Singapore’s position is that these are three distinct decisions and that a government may honestly land on the second without owing anybody the third.

The reason offered for keeping the third out of court is not a reason about who deserves what. It is a reason about institutions. Judges, the Prime Minister said, interpret and apply the law; they have neither the expertise nor the mandate to settle political questions or to rule on social norms and values, because these are not fundamentally legal problems. He added a second, more practical claim: that forcing the pace through adversarial litigation would highlight differences, inflame tensions and polarise society, and he named the culture wars of other countries as what he was trying not to import. The settlement was described, in the Government’s own words, as a political accommodation, one that balances different legitimate views and aspirations, in which no group can have things all their way.

Take that seriously and the charge of hypocrisy does not survive contact with it. Hypocrisy is prosecuting in private what you permit in public, or claiming a principle you do not apply. Neither is what happened. The state said that what adults do privately is not its business and then made it not its business. It also said that the legal family is a distributive system whose reorganisation has winners and losers, that a polity may reasonably insist on doing that slowly and by majority rather than in a courtroom, and then it wrote that insistence into the Constitution in the narrowest form that would achieve it. Whether one likes the position is a separate question from whether it is one position. It is one position.

Nothing in it requires contempt for anyone, and the speech did not supply any. It described gay Singaporeans as fellow citizens, colleagues, friends and family members who want to live their own lives and contribute fully. A reader who needs the position to be cruel in order to argue with it will be arguing with something else.

The second reading — that this is a waypoint — is harder to dislodge because it does not feel like a claim. It feels like a description. Singapore has decriminalised but not yet recognised. The word yet is doing the whole of the work, and it is a claim about the future smuggled in as a report about the present.

The assumption comes from somewhere real. A number of countries did run a sequence, and it went decriminalise, then register, then recognise, and once three or four of them had run it the sequence started to look like a mechanism. It is not one. This chamber has already looked at Taiwan, where a constitutional court went first and the resulting statute carries the judgment’s number in its name, so that the recognition arrived before any legislature had chosen it. It has looked at Australia, where a government put a family to a national postal survey and the essay’s subject was what the asking cost the people asked about, not the result. It has looked at Thailand, where the marriage register opened while the identity card stayed exactly as it was, so that a person could be married in the morning and misdescribed on paper in the afternoon. Three countries, three orders of operations, no order.

Set those beside Singapore and the ladder disappears. What is left is a set of societies that each answered several separable questions in an order determined by which institution moved first and what the movement cost. Singapore is not late on a schedule. It is a place where the institution that moved first was the legislature, acting to keep a second institution out.

The honest form of this essay’s claim is narrow and it should be stated as such. It is not a prediction that Singapore will never recognise a different family; Article 156 leaves that entirely open to Parliament, and this essay has no view on whether Parliament will. It is not a prediction that it will. It is only that the sentence Singapore has not got there yet contains a destination, that the destination was supplied by the speaker rather than by Singapore, and that a chamber which exists to look at other societies as mirrors has an obligation to notice when it is looking at its own assumptions instead.

Singapore is a good place to test an abstraction about the family, because the family is not an abstraction there. It is a category on a housing application. The Department of Statistics recorded about 1.15 million of some 1.49 million resident households living in Housing and Development Board dwellings in 2025. Public housing is the ordinary way a Singaporean household comes to have a home, and access to it is organised by eligibility schemes that ask, first, what kind of household you are.

Two people who intend to marry can apply together under the Fiancé and Fiancée Scheme. They form what the Board calls a core family nucleus. The minimum age is twenty-one. They may apply for a new flat of up to five rooms, and they must solemnise the marriage within three months of completing the purchase.

Two men, or two women, cannot form a core family nucleus at all, because the nucleus is built out of relationships the law recognises and this is not one. Each of them can buy a flat as a single Singapore citizen, which requires being at least thirty-five. A single buying from the Board may apply for a two-room Flexi flat; the larger flat types are not available to them from the Board, though a single may buy most types on the resale market, and two or more singles who each meet the age condition may apply together under the joint route.

So the difference between a couple the state has arrangements for and two people it has merely stopped prosecuting, expressed in the units in which people actually live, is fourteen years and a flat type. That is not an unforeseen side effect of the 2022 settlement. It was named in advance. When the Prime Minister listed the policies that rely on the definition of marriage, public housing was the first item on the list, followed by education, adoption rules, advertising standards and film classification, and he said the Government had no intention of changing the definition or those policies.

One more thing belongs here, set down as a juxtaposition and not as a causal claim, because the essay has no evidence for a causal claim and will not imply one. The institution these arrangements are built to support is one that fewer citizens are entering and fewer are having children inside. There were 22,955 citizen marriages in 2024, down from 24,355 the year before; there were 29,237 citizen births. The resident total fertility rate was 0.97 in 2023 and in 2024, and 0.87 in 2025. Nothing in those figures argues that recognising other households would move them. They are here because an essay about a state’s family policy that omitted the state of the family would be describing an instrument without describing what it is playing.

Because the definition is load-bearing, it reaches further than the housing queue, and the reach is worth tracing precisely rather than gestured at.

Adoption is the clearest case, because it is where the question stops being about two adults. Under the Adoption of Children Act 2022, a joint adoption application may be made only by two individuals married to each other — in Singapore under the Women’s Charter or the Administration of Muslim Law Act, or outside Singapore in circumstances where the marriage would be taken to be lawful had it taken place in Singapore. A same-sex couple cannot satisfy that condition, because the Women’s Charter makes such a marriage void. An individual may still apply alone, subject to the Act’s other conditions. The definition therefore does not stop at the couple; it arrives at the child, who is either inside a recognised family or attached to one adult.

Employment law shows the shape from another side. Singapore passed its first general statute against workplace discrimination, the Workplace Fairness Act 2025, on 8 January 2025, with effect slated for the end of 2027. It names its protected characteristics: age; nationality; sex, marital status, pregnancy status and caregiving responsibilities; race, religion and language ability; disability and mental health conditions. Sexual orientation is not among them. Other grounds are addressed by the tripartite guidelines on fair employment practices, which are guidelines. The pattern is consistent with the 2022 settlement rather than in tension with it: the state stopped criminalising and did not start providing.

Public life follows the same logic. Assemblies at the Speakers’ Corner in Hong Lim Park are open to citizens and permanent residents, and the Ministry of Home Affairs stated in 2016 that foreign entities should not fund, support or influence events held there, on the ground that such matters are for Singaporeans to decide — a position it applied in terms to events on both sides of the question.

And now the counterweight, which this essay is obliged to state as plainly as the cost. Nobody is being arrested. The state has said, in the clearest language a government uses, that private sexual behaviour between consenting adults raises no law-and-order issue and that there is no justification for making it a crime. To describe what remains as persecution would be false, and would make the real cost illegible by inflating it. The cost is exactly this and no more: the difference between a life the state does not interfere with and a life the state has arrangements for. That is what tolerated means when the word is used administratively rather than warmly, and it is not nothing. Being tolerated is a status, and like every status it has a shape, and the shape here is an age, a flat type, an adoption form and a list of protected characteristics with one absence in it.

Japan arrives at the same question from the opposite direction, and the comparison is the reason this essay exists.

Japan has no national recognition and a live constitutional argument. Its municipalities have built something in the gap: partnership declaration systems, beginning in Tokyo wards in 2015 and now recorded by the campaign organisation Marriage For All Japan in 566 of 1,788 municipalities, covering roughly 117 million of the country’s 125 million residents. A certificate issued under such a system is an act of a local authority. It does not create a status under national law. It does not carry inheritance, and it does not carry parental rights. What it does is make a couple legible at a counter, which is not nothing and is also not what it is often reported to be.

The courts have been asked directly. By 2026 five high courts — Sapporo, Tokyo, Fukuoka, Nagoya and Osaka — had held that the exclusion of same-sex couples violates Article 14, paragraph 1, on equality before the law, and Article 24, paragraph 2, which requires that laws on the family be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity; Sapporo also found a violation of Article 24, paragraph 1, and Fukuoka of Article 13. A different panel of the Tokyo High Court held in November 2025 that the exclusion is constitutional, reasoning that it is rational to read the married couple as a legal man and a legal woman. On 25 March 2026 the Third Petty Bench of the Supreme Court referred six of these appeals to the Grand Bench, where all fifteen justices sit, for a unified constitutional ruling. In all six, the damages claims had already failed.

So the comparative finding is not that one country is ahead. It is that Singapore answered this question in advance, deliberately, in writing, and gave its reasons; and Japan has not answered it and is now about to be asked in the one forum that can answer for the whole country. And the thing this chamber wants to say about that is the thing a foreign reader will resist: an open question is not obviously worse to live inside than a closed one.

Consider what each costs the person living in it. An open question means that the legal existence of your household is an argument conducted in public, about you, by people who will go home afterwards; that you cannot plan on a date; that the cost of moving it is carried by named individuals who put their lives into a caption. It also means that something could change without anyone having to grant you anything. A closed question spares you the argument and takes the possibility with it: you are not in a fight, and you are not in a queue. Those two costs are not in the same currency, and the people paying them are not the same people, and this essay declines to convert one into the other to produce a ranking.

One precision cuts both ways and should be said, because it is the part most easily lost. Article 156 did not make Singapore’s answer permanent; it moved the answer to Parliament, where an ordinary majority could reach it. And Japan’s Grand Bench could close its question in either direction. Neither country is standing where it looks like it is standing.

The strongest objection to everything above is that coherent is too generous a word, and that using it does work. A position can be internally consistent and still be an accommodation struck with one constituency at the expense of another; consistency is cheap, and a settlement that balances different legitimate views is a settlement in which the people whose lives are the subject of the balancing are one of the weights. An objector can add that the institutional argument is doing convenient service — that courts are described as the wrong forum for exactly the questions on which they might have decided the other way, and that this is not obviously a principle rather than a preference with a principle attached.

The essay grants the force of that and answers only in part. Coherence is not a virtue that outweighs anything. It is a description, and its use is that it makes the cost legible. The word hypocrisy does the opposite: it argues about the speaker rather than the arrangement, and a reader who has settled the question of the speaker’s character rarely goes on to work out what the arrangement does at the housing counter. The essay would rather lose the argument about motive and keep the fourteen years and the flat type.

A second objection is that a foreign essay declining to rank two countries is a comfortable evasion. Partly true. But the ranking a foreign reader would perform is not free either, and it is usually performed on behalf of people who were not asked and whose two situations are not commensurable, which is what the refusal is for.

As for this house, the uncomfortable thing should be said before anything else and against its own interest. This house sells hours that no register records. Its entire proposition is a private arrangement that provides something the public arrangements in a person’s life do not reach — attention, company, a form of recognition that arrives by appointment rather than by status. That is a service with a structural interest in the gap between what a society provides for and what it merely permits, because the gap is where its customers come from. A house that writes an essay about tolerated versus provided for is writing about the conditions of its own market, and it should say so first rather than let a reader discover it.

It claims nothing about the character of Singaporeans, who disagree with one another about this as thoroughly as any population does, and nothing about anyone’s motives beyond what was stated on the record and can be read there.

It makes no causal claim connecting family recognition to fertility, marriage or birth figures in either direction. The figures for citizen marriages, citizen births and the resident total fertility rate are set beside the policy architecture as a juxtaposition, and a reader who converts that into an argument is supplying the argument.

It makes no claim about how many people in Singapore hold which opinion. Survey figures on attitudes exist and are deliberately not used here, because the essay’s subject is an arrangement and not a distribution of views, and because a prevalence claim needs a grade of source this essay did not want to lean on for this purpose.

It predicts nothing. Article 156 leaves the definition of marriage to the Legislature, and what a legislature will do is not a thing this chamber knows. Japan’s Grand Bench has not ruled, and nothing here anticipates what it will say.

It is not advice to any reader about her own legal position, in either country, and no one should take a sentence here as a description of her own eligibility for anything. Housing rules, grant ceilings and flat classifications are administrative, published and revised; they are described here as they stand and they will move.

It is not a contribution to any movement in either country, and it endorses no organisation named in it. The Japanese municipal count is compiled by a campaign organisation from public announcements; that organisation states that its list may be incomplete, and the essay uses its figures as an order of magnitude rather than a census. The Workplace Fairness Act is not yet in force. The Court of Appeal judgment of 2022 is described by its holding and not by its reasoning at length.

And it is written by an outsider to both societies, from statutes, published administrative rules, official statistics and the public record, without a single person from either country quoted in it. That is a real limitation and it bounds the whole essay: everything above describes what the law provides for, which is not the same as knowing what any life inside it is like. What it does claim is small and it can be carried from one country to the other without translation. The people whose private conduct is now lawful still cannot form a family the state recognises, and tolerated is a different status from provided for, and the distance between the two can be written down in years and rooms.