A legal ban on same-sex marriage in the Mexican state of Oaxacan was declared unconstitutional by that nation’s Supreme Court on February 18, the Washington Blade reports. The ruling cited two US precedents –– a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down bans on interracial marriage and the high court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that ordered an end to school segregation.
“The historic disadvantages that homosexuals have suffered have been amply recognized and documented: public scorn, verbal abuse, discrimination in their places of employment and in the access of certain services, including their exclusion from certain aspects of public life,” read the decision according to the Blade. “In comparative law it has been argued that discrimination that homosexual couples have suffered when they are denied access to marriage is analogous with the discrimination suffered by interracial couples at another time.”
Same-sex couples have been able to marry in Mexico City since 2010, and the court has since ruled that other Mexican states must recognize those marriages.
