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New Mexico’s highest state courtroom overturned a ban on gay marriage Thursday, making the state the sixteenth within the union (plus Washington, D.C.) to have legalized similar-intercourse marriage.
The state had by no means explicitly outlawed same-intercourse marriage; however, a state regulation on the books when you consider that 1961 required marriage licenses include most effective a local for “husband” and “spouse,” which acted, the state’s Attorneys General made up our minds, as a de facto ban (although present AG Gary King notion the regulation unconstitutional).
After a rustic clerk began issuing marriage licenses to same intercourse couples in August, eight of the state’s thirty-three counties followed swimsuit. On Thursday the state supreme court declared the provision unconstitutional, in accordance with a 1972 constitutional modification prohibiting discrimination “because of the sex of somebody.”
Advocates of the ban had argued that the state had a substantial hobby in defining marriage as a union interested by procreation, but the court docket shot that argument down.
“Procreation has by no means been a condition of marriage underneath New Mexico law,” the justices wrote in their resolution, “as evidenced by using the truth that the aged, the infertile, and those who select to not have children usually are not precluded from marrying.”
[Image via Reuters]
