Puerto Rico may stop defending in court
its laws limiting marriage to heterosexual couples and prohibiting
the territory from recognizing the legal out-of-state marriages of
gay and lesbian couples.
El
Nuevo Dia reported this week that Governor Alejandro Garcia
Padilla, a Democrat and a defendant in the case, is “contemplating”
a “change of posture and withdraw his support of the Puerto Rican
statute that only recognizes marriage as a union between a man and a
woman.”
Last year, a federal judge upheld
Puerto Rico's ban, saying that allowing such unions could lead to
plural and incestuous marriages.
“A clear majority of courts have
struck down statutes that affirm opposite-gender marriage only,”
U.S. District Judge Juan M. Perez-Gimenez wrote in his 21-page
ruling. “In their ingenuity and imagination they have constructed
a seemingly comprehensive legal structure for this new form of
marriage. And yet what is lacking and unaccounted for remains: are
laws barring polygamy, or, say the marriage of fathers and daughters,
now of doubtful validity?”
Lambda Legal, which is representing
three couples who want Puerto Rico to recognize their marriages and
two couples who wish to marry in the territory, appealed the decision
to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. The First Circuit
includes five states, all of which allow gay couples to marry, plus
Puerto Rico.
“We are encouraged that the
government is reconsidering its defense of its discriminatory ban on
the freedom to marry for same-sex couples,” Oscar Gonzalez-Pagan,
staff attorney for Lambda Legal, said
Monday in a statement. “We have always maintained that the ban
is unconstitutional and we are eager for a court to vindicate the
rights of our plaintiff couples.”
The governor has until Friday to file a
response with the appeals court.