Mexican Supreme Court OK's Marriage Equality in Jalisco

Both of Mexico's largest cities now embrace marriage equality, thanks to a ruling from the Mexican Supreme Court striking down a Jalisco law that limited marriage to one man and one woman.

The Associated Press reports that the ruling makes Jalisco the fourth Mexican jurisdiction "where gay couples can automatically get married." The central Pacific state's capital, Guadalajara, is the nation's second-largest city, after Mexico City -- which embraced legal marriage equality in 2010. Shortly thereafter, the high court ruled that same-sex marriages performed in Mexico City must be recognized by every other jurisdiction in the nation.

Mexico's march toward marriage equality has picked up speed in the past year, after the high court last June issued a "jurisprudential thesis" declaring laws that restricted marriage to opposite-sex couples to be unconstitutional. While the liberal-leaning court stopped short of mandating legal marriage equality nationwide, it did suggest that any laws in Mexico's 31 states that consider the purpose of marriage to be "procreation, and or defines [marriage] as celebrated between a man and a woman [are] unconstitutional."

In 2012, Mexico's Supreme Court unanimously struck down a ban on same-sex marriage in the southern state of Oaxaca. By 2013, individual same-sex couples had received legal permission to marry in Chihuahua and Jalisco. And in 2014, the state of Coahuila in became the first to enact marriage equality by way of a state legislature, with a nearly unanimous vote in favor. Last December , the western state of Nayarit also embraced marriage equality when state lawmakers passed an amendment to the civil code granting same-sex couples the same rights and privileges as opposite-sex couples seeking to marry.