A path has been cleared for same-sex couples to marry in the state of Jalisco without any impediment following a landmark ruling made Tuesday by Mexico’s Supreme Court.
All 11 judges invalidated the section of Article 260 of Jalisco’s Civil Code that considers marriage to only be between a man and a woman.
The judges also struck down segments of two other articles that take similar positions.
This means that same-sex couples can now go to a civil registry and apply to marry without the fear of being refused.
Over the past three years a few couples have managed to marry but only after they filed injunctions (amparos) in federal courts and received legal rulings in their favor.
“This is an historic day for human rights and all LGBT people, as well as for the state of Jalisco,” the non-profit group Union Diversa de Jalisco declared in a press release.
“Legislators will now be forced to change the state Civil Code and its secondary laws,” predicted Luis Guzman of the Codise collective, one of a small group who celebrated the decision outside the Jalisco Congress building on Tuesday afternoon.
Guzman said the news would be a great relief to some 100 same-sex couples that he knows are waiting to get married in Jalisco.
Jalisco Governor Aristoteles Sandoval said the state government welcomed the Supreme Court ruling and that it was a priority of his government to “respect individual liberties.” He said the onus was now on the state Congress to make the necessary changes to the law.
Legislators from three parties – the Citizens Movement (MC), Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) – said they would support changing the Civil Code, as did independent Pedro Kumamoto.
The coordinator of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) grouping in the state legislature called the decision “unfortunate.” Miguel Angel Monraz said the Supreme Court ought to respect the autonomy of Jalisco and the “federalist pact.” He said legislators from his party would wait for the final wording of the ruling before deciding what posture to take but believed a full “philosophical and anthropological debate” on the issue, involving a wide spectrum of the state’s population, should be held before any vote.
Antonio Gutierrez, spokesperson for the archdiocese of Guadalajara, said the ruling was “a discriminatory act against heterosexual couples,” since it “distorts the concept of marriage.”
Several thousand people took part in a demonstration against same-sex marriage last year after Mexico’s high court issued a ”jurisprudential thesis” declaring state laws that restricted marriage to opposite-sex couples to be unconstitutional.
Tuesday’s ruling on marriage equality in Jalisco goes one step further, and legislators here could face sanctions if they fail to amend the Civil Code accordingly.
Luis Martinez Guzman, a spokesperson for the group Uno por los Niños, said they would be investigating legal ways to reverse the ruling. He lamented the decision of the high court judges and said they had “not listened to the hundreds of thousands of voices in Jalisco who demonstrated in favor of the family six months ago.”
In her summary, Supreme Court judge Judge Norma Lucia Piña Hernandez said while state legislatures are free to configure their own regulations, it is sometimes necessary to “place limits” on them.
In a line that echoed the other judges, she noted that the Mexican Constitution makes no mention of a “marriage model” but that Article One specifically “prohibits discrimination” on the grounds of sexual preference. (Article 1 of the Mexican Constitution forbids “all types of discrimination whether it be for ethnic origin, national origin, gender, age, different capacities, social condition, health condition, religion, opinions, sexual preferences or civil state, or any other which attacks human dignity and has as an objective to destroy the rights and liberties of the people.”)