Legal News

Mexico City Lawmakers Approve Same-Sex Marriage

By Ashby Jones

The same-sex marriage movement has spread south of the border. Well, at least to one pocket south of the border.

The news: the local legislature in Mexico City on Monday approved a far-reaching gay rights bill which allows same-sex couples to marry and adopt children. Click here for the story, from the LA Times.

The leftist-dominated legislature of Mexico City rebuffed opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, and approved the measure by a 39-20 vote. According to the LAT story, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard is expected to sign the bill into law.

“Mexico City has put itself in the vanguard,” said legislator Victor Hugo Romo. “This is a historic day.”

The LAT writes that Uruguay was the first Latin American nation to recognize same-sex unions, as well as adoptions by gay couples, and some cities in Argentina have adopted similar laws. But the Mexico City initiative goes further than any other in Latin America by rewriting the law to redefine marriage as a “free union between two people,” not only between a man and a woman. It gives homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual pairs, including the right to adopt, inherit, obtain joint housing loans and share insurance policies.

“This is wonderful,” gay rights activist Judith Vasquez said from the noisy legislature floor. Gay “couples have effectively been together for years, decades, centuries,” she said. “But now it is our right.”

Most of the opposition in the city’s legislature came from President Felipe Calderon’s conservative National Action Party, which has threatened to take the city to court if Ebrard does not veto the measure.

Also opposed was the Roman Catholic Church, which labeled the proposal immoral, saying marriage must hold the promise of procreation. Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera said the law created the “perverse possibility” that “innocent children” would be adopted by gay couples.

“It is an aberration,” said activist Jorge Serrano Limon. “Marriage cannot be between men. That is absurd.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 22, 2009 (boomark / email).