Mexico Appears to Have Crossed a Major Hurdle to Marriage Equality J. Lester Feder - BuzzFeed
go to original June 6, 2015

Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed News with research assistance from Rex Wockner

With a Supreme Court ruling issued on Wednesday, Mexico has crossed an important technical hurdle towards establishing marriage equality throughout all of its 31 states.

The Supreme Court and several lower courts have already ruled in almost every state that same-sex couples have the right to marry under the Mexican constitution. But because of the Mexican court system’s often confusing technicalities, none of those decisions have been binding in future cases. Theoretically, any court could rule against a couple who has sued for the right to marry even though there have been many cases decided in favor of others couples.

That is no longer true. On Wednesday, Mexico’s Supreme Court issued the first blanket statement that laws prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying are unconstitutional in every state — what is known as “generic jurisprudence.” The opinion is not yet public, but Supreme Court clerk Geraldina Gonzalez de la Vega — who worked on one of the early marriage equality suits before joining the court — wrote about the unpublished opinion in a blog post. (Decisions like these are ordinarily published within a week of when they are decided by the court.)

“The law of whatever federal entity that, on the one hand, considers the goal of marriage is procreation and/or defines marriage as celebrating the union of a man and a woman is unconstitutional,” held a Supreme Court panel in response to a suit out of the state of Colima, according to Gonzalez.

Read the rest at BuzzFeed

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!