Marriage News: Massachusetts, Mexico and South Africa

There's been some exciting developments involving same-sex marriage in various areas around the world in the last few days.

As MadProfessah reported yesterday, marriage opponents needed just 50 votes out of 200 possible in the joint session of the state legislature to continue the process of forcing Massachusetts voters to decide the question of whether their state constitution should be amended to override the 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision (Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health) which legalized gay marriage in the Bay State.
However, late yesterday evening came the lovely news from the Washington Blade website that there was a vote of 109-87 to recess the constitutional convention until January 2, 2007, the last possible date of the current legislative session. If no vote occurs on that day, then the 170, 000 signatures marriage opponents gathered will be deemed null and void. They will have to start gathering signatures again, and attempting to have votes by 25% of two constitutional conventions in two consecutive legislative sessions. Bottom line, yesterday's events mean ithat "a fatal blow" has been dealt to the hopes of gay marriage opponents to force a November 2008 vote to end gay marriage in the one state in the United States which has had it since May 17, 2004, with over 7,000 same-sex couples married to date.

There was more good news (hat tip to Apuuli and Blabbeando) about advances for state recognition of same-sex couples in other parts of the world, also. On Thursday, the Mexico City Assembly voted 43-17 (with 5 abstentions) to pass a civil unions bill which would provide registered couples with municipal benefits equivalent to heterosexual married couples. Mexico City (known as Distrito Federal or simply D.F. in Spanish) is the capital district of the Government of Mexico similar to Washington, D.C. except that is on a much larger scale, with a population of nearly 9 million people. The Mayor of Mexico City, Alejandro Encina, stated his intention to sign the measure into law. Interestingly, heterosexual couples are allowed to register under the legislation. Same-sex marriage is still explictly banned under Mexico City law and Mexican law, in the world's second largest Roman Catholic nation.

In addition to developments in Mexico this week, there was also good news from South Africa also. On Friday, a parliamentary committee approved a bill to allow same-sex couples to register their unions with the state similarly (but separately) to heterosexual couples who want to get married. The government of South Africa is under a December 1, 2006 court-mandated deadline to end discrimination based on sexual orientation in state-sanctioned marriages thanks to a ruling (Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie) issued December 1, 2005 by the High Court of South Africa in which the Ministry of Home Affairs lost a combined lawsuit accusing it of violating South Africa's explicit constitutional guarantee of equal rights based on sexual orientation (the country has had, since 1996, the first national constitution in the world to include sexual orientation) by not issuing civil marriage licences to same-sex couples.