In-depth look at how New Mexico won gay marriage

New Mexico is now the 17th state (plus D.C.) to legalize gay marriage, thanks to a ruling by the New Mexico Supreme Court.

Now it’s time to look at the ruling itself and figure out the arguments and implications. In this loooong post, I’ll go through the ruling paragraph by paragraph and pull out all the interesting bits.

The required: “I’m no attorney but…” Hey, the language is actually rather straightforward and not difficult to figure out.

Like the case in New Jersey not that long ago, the New Mexico courts were brought in to deal with an untenable situation.

In New Jersey, it was the inherent inequality of civil unions for gay couples, rather than real marriage. This situation was further complicated after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Section 3 of DOMA this past June, which had prohibited the Federal government from recognizing legally enacted same sex marriages.

Since then, the Feds have made it clear that civil unions and domestic partnerships don’t rise to the level of ‘marriage’ for federal law. Hence civil unions had to be replaced with actual civil marriage.

New Mexico’s situation was different: The state Constitution has specific measures to say that discrimination on the basis of gender is illegal — and this rationale has been used several times to extend non-discrimination rights to LGBT New Mexicans.

Moreover, New Mexico’s general marriage law, as written, makes no reference to gender, a situation that was used by one county clerk in 2004 to attempt to extend marriage rights, but was turned back.

At the time, the 2004 lower court ruling and temporary injunction directed the NM state legislature to deal with the conflict — and they never did. Conservative groups, especially the Catholic Church, lobbied heavily every time the issue came up for consideration, and always successfully derailed any move towards marriage equality, even for something as unequal as a domestic partnership registry.

On top of this, back in August of this year, a Doña Ana county clerk began issuing marriage licenses, which later resulted in several counties joining voluntarily, others being ordered by lower courts to join in, and a whole bunch of county clerks — both pro- and anti-marriage equality — desperate to know what the law should actually be.

Although it was only a handful of counties, nearly 70% of New Mexico residents lived in a ‘marriage equality county’ — but lacked still lacked state recognition. We were in legal limbo.

Today’s unanimous NM Supreme Court ruling was unequivocal: LGBTs deserve equal protection under the law.

I’ve been reading through the ruling, and so much of it just jumps out at me as incredibly powerful language. This is a ruling that slams the homophobes and bigots again and again, and demolishes every one of their legal arguments. I’ll try to step through some of it here, based on the full text of the ruling. An easy-to-read version is also available on Casetext here.

It’s a very long post, so I’ve tried to break it up, yet remain somewhat chronological in the ruling text itself.

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