Breaking: Federal Judge Rules Against Same-Sex Couple In Puerto Rico, Dismisses Case

A federal judge for Puerto Rico has ruled that the government has the right to decide who can marry, declaring that Windsor is irrelevant.

United States District Judge Juan Perez-Gimenez has dismissed a case challenging Puerto Rico’s 1999 ban on same-sex marriage, ruling that the government has the authority to decide who can marry — and who cannot. The suit, filed in March, was brought by Ada Mercedes Conde Vidal and Ivonne Alvarez Perez, the first couple from the island to legally marry in Massachusetts.

The Washington Post tonight reports Judge Perez-Gimenez, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, “concluded the outcome was controlled by the Supreme Court’s summary rejection of same-sex marriage claims in Baker v. Nelson in 1972, a view that has been rejected by every other federal court since United States v. Windsor on the grounds that doctrinal changes have eroded Baker.”

While purporting not to decide the merits, the judge made plain his merits conclusions about constitutional arguments for same-sex marriage in a concluding section:

Recent affirmances of same-gender marriage seem to suffer from a peculiar inability to recall the principles embodied in existing marriage law. Traditional marriage is “exclusively [an] opposite-sex institution . . . inextricably linked to procreation and biological kinship,” Windsor, 133 S. Ct. at 2718 (Alito, J., dissenting). Traditional marriage is the fundamental unit of the political order. And ultimately the very survival of the political order depends upon the procreative potential embodied in traditional marriage. Those are the well-tested, well-proven principles on which we have relied for centuries. The question now is whether judicial 

“wisdom” may contrive methods by which those solid principles can be circumvented or even discarded. 

The judge’s strongly-worded ruling sets in motion an appeal to the 1st Circuit. 

The Supreme Court has refused to review any appellate court rulings since there have been no differences of opinion at the appellate court level. The 1st Circuit is believed to be composed of more liberal jurists.

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