His church turned him away, his family discouraged him from a public fight and the government of the state where he lives vowed it would never happen.
It did.
Hiram Gonzalez married his boyfriend, Severiano Chavez, last year in the northern state of Chihuahua, which, like most Mexican states, technically allows marriage only between a man and a woman.
However, Gonzalez and dozens of other gay couples in recent months have found a powerful ally: Mexico’s Supreme Court.
In ruling after ruling, the court has said that state laws restricting marriage to heterosexuals are discriminatory.
“When I heard the judge pronounce us legally married, I burst into tears,” said Gonzalez, 41, who needed a court order to exchange vows.
As the US awaits a landmark decision on gay marriage by the US Supreme Court, the Mexican court’s rulings have added the nation to a slowly growing list of Latin American nations permitting same-sex unions.
Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil already allow same-sex marriage. Chile plans to recognize same-sex civil unions this year; Ecuador approved civil unions in April; and Colombia grants same-sex couples many of the same rights extended to heterosexual married couples.
‘HUGE CHANGE’
“It is a huge change from where things were 10 years ago,” said Jason Pierceson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield who studies same-sex marriage trends in Latin America.
The shift in Mexico, the second largest country in Latin America after Brazil, is the product of a legal strategy that advocates used to bypass state legislatures, which have shown little inclination, and often hostility, to legalizing same-sex marriage.
In 2009, Mexico City, a federal district and large liberal island in this socially conservative country, legalized same-sex marriage — a first in Latin America. There have been 5,297 same-sex weddings there since then, some of them couples coming from other states.
Of the nation’s 31 states, only one, Coahuila, near the Texas border, has legalized same-sex marriage. A second, Quintana Roo, where Cancun is, has allowed same-sex unions since 2012, when advocates said that its civil code on marriage did not stipulate that couples be one man and one woman.
In most of the rest of the nation, marriage is legally defined as a union between a man and a woman.
Mexico’s Supreme Court upheld Mexico City’s law in 2010, adding that other states had to recognize marriages performed there.
Advocates of same-sex marriage saw that as an opportunity to use the court’s rulings to assert that marriage laws in other states were discriminatory.
The court — taking into account international decisions and antidiscrimination treaties that Mexico has signed — has steadily agreed, granting injunctions in individual cases permitting gay couples to marry in states where laws forbid it.
MAJOR TURNING POINT
A major turning point occurred this month, when the court expanded on its rulings to issue a decree that any state law restricting marriage to heterosexuals is discriminatory.
“As the purpose of matrimony is not procreation, there is no justified reason that the matrimonial union be heterosexual, nor that it be stated as between only a man and only a woman,” the ruling said. “Such a statement turns out to be discriminatory in its mere expression.”
While the ruling does not automatically strike down the state marriage laws, it allows gay couples who are denied marriage rights in their states to seek injunctions from district judges, who are now obligated to grant them.
In Gonzalez’s case, Mexico’s Supreme Court had already ruled that the law in Chihuahua was unconstitutional, enabling the couple to get an injunction so their marriage could go forward.
State officials in Chihuahua vowed to never legalize same-sex marriage and Gonzalez said he was expelled from his local church for being gay.
He and his husband refused to go to Mexico City to get married because they said they believed they should have that right in the state where they pay taxes.
The principle was important, he said.
“It is not just the legal battle, but what it involves, the emotional and physical strain of the process,” Gonzalez said. “At the end, it is a fight for your dignity.”
The court ruled in the couples’ favor. It was the first such decision in a state case.
“We opened the door in Oaxaca and we are now opening it in different states,” Mendez said.
Bureaucratic hurdles — and sometimes hostility — remain.
Civil registry authorities abiding by state laws can still block couples hoping to marry.
However, experts said that Mexico had already reached a watershed.
“It certainly looks like there will be more marriage equality in Mexico in the near future,” Pierceson said. “We do not know if there will be any backlash or counterprotests to stop it.”
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