Supreme Court of Mexico Rules for Gay Marriage
BY J. LESTER FEDER
The country is on track to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide before its neighbor to the north
In a unanimous ruling Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Mexico has paved the way for same-sex couples to marry in every one of the country’s 31 states before the U.S. has federal marriage equality.
Gay marriage has been legal in the Federal District, Mexico City, since 2010, and the Supreme Court had previously ruled that those marriages must be recognized nationwide. Wednesday’s ruling struck down a law in the southern state of Oaxaca that denied same-sex couples the right to marry there.
The ruling could have repercussions beyond Mexico’s borders. The couples seeking to marry in the Oaxaca case based their claims partly on protections in the American Convention on Human Rights, which has legal force in many Latin American countries. In saying that bans on same-sex marriage are discriminatory, the court may establish a precedent that could be used by LGBT activists throughout the region.
This comes before the U.S. Supreme Court has even decided whether it will hear a gay marriage case.
This Oaxaca case, which has broad implications, had an unlikely beginning. It was initiated by a Oaxacan law student, Alex AlĂ MĂ©ndez DĂaz, who brought suits on behalf of a handful of couples even though other LGBT activists in his state warned that they were doomed to fail.
MĂ©ndez met a couple named Alejandro and Guillermo while working with the Oaxacan Front for the Respect and Recognition of Sexual Diversity [Frente Oaxaqueño por el Respeto y el Reconocimiento de la Diversidad Sexual] to plan a 2011 gay rights march. (MĂ©ndez has not released the last names of his clients to protect their privacy.) They said they wanted to get married but couldn’t afford the trip to Mexico City.
MĂ©ndez took a look at the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding Mexico City’s marriage ordinance and decided they could build a case at home. “The document seemed to me to be extraordinary,” MĂ©ndez said in an interview in Oaxaca City last week. The court seemed to be saying that “family” rights in the Mexican constitution are not restricted “only to a family of a father, a mother, and children, but also to whatever other form of family.”
Activists “said Oaxaca wasn’t ready for those discussions,” MĂ©ndez said of the poor and largely rural state. “So I said, ‘Fine, if the collective won’t do this as a collective, well, I’m the only lawyer [in the group]. I’ll do it.”
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