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| "Outside of Mexico, and even inside of Mexico, these advances are not widely known... but it is irreversible," the lawyer who started the wave of cases now sweeping the country told BuzzFeed News. | |
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Courts in more than two-thirds of Mexico's 31 states have granted same-sex couples the right to marry over the past two years in a series of rulings that will likely make marriage equality a reality nationwide in the near future.
The wave of rulings throughout Mexico hasn't caused the uproar that has followed rulings in the United States over the past year striking down state laws barring same-sex couples from marrying. Couples have not rushed to marry, nor have conservatives organized major protests. This is in part because the technicalities of Mexican law have meant these decisions have been much more narrow in their immediate impact.
Each decision applies only to the individuals who have brought the cases, and other same-sex couples will still have to sue in order to marry. It takes multiple cases meeting certain technical requirements for the courts to nullify a state law in Mexico — a hurdle that has not yet been met.
But with new rulings being announced almost every week — judges in seven new states ruled in favor of marriage equality in the first three months of 2015 alone — it seems almost inevitable that this day is coming, say legal experts who have closely followed the litigation. "It's just a matter of time," said Geraldina Gonzalez de la Vega, a lawyer who worked on the first of these suits filed in 2011 and is now a clerk to a Supreme Court minister. "This has spread all over the country."
The first place in Mexico to allow same-sex couples to marry was Mexico City — a federal district that functions like a state, sort of like Washington D.C in the U.S. A marriage equality law was adopted by the city's legislature at the very end of 2009. When opponents took the law to Mexico's Supreme Court, the judges ruled that it was constitutional for Mexico City to recognize same-sex couples and went one step further: They also held that the city's marriages were valid in every state of the country.
But the Supreme Court left state marriage codes restricting marriage to heterosexual couples in place. The first case to argue that state marriage laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman were also unconstitutional seemed like a long shot. Unlike in the United States, where legal activists spent years spelling out the grounds for marriage equality and some state challenges attracted A-list attorneys, the idea to challenge a state marriage code came from a law student in the largely rural state of Oaxaca.
Alex Alí Méndez Díaz has now been involved in lawsuits in 19 states even though he is still finishing advanced studies in Mexico City and has an unrelated full-time job.
"Outside of Mexico, and even inside of Mexico, these advances are not widely known," Méndez said. "It is very slow, it is very invisible — but it is irreversible."
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