String of same-sex marriage rulings reaches Florida (UPDATED)
on Jul 17, 2014 at 5:52 pm
UPDATED 9:33 p.m. State officials have now filed a formal notice that they will appeal this ruling to a higher state court, and that apparently has the legal effect of delaying the decision’s effective date.
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The still-unbroken string of court rulings over the past year striking down state bans on same-sex marriage reached Florida on Thursday — at least in Monroe County, the local government that covers the Florida Keys on the state’s southern tip. The fourteen-page ruling by a state trial judge is to go into effect in that county next Tuesday.
Circuit Judge Luis M. Garcia of Tavernier found that the Florida ban, approved by voters of the state in 2008, violated federal constitutional guarantees of due process and legal equality. The measure had won approval at the polls by a margin of about sixty-two percent to thirty-eight percent.
Because Judge Garcia’s ruling is only directed to the Monroe County clerk, Amy Heavilin, it will require that marriage licenses be issued only in that county. However, another challenge to the Florida ban is pending in another state court in Miami-Dade County and in a federal court case in Tallahassee. The federal case would affect the ban statewide.
It is unclear whether state officials will appeal the Garcia decision. Although he struck down the part of the state constitution that prohibits new same-sex marriages, he refused to nullify a state law that bars recognition of same-sex marriages of Florida couples who were wed elsewhere. No one in the case had had such a marriage, the judge said.
A total of nineteen states and Washington, D.C., now permit same-sex marriage. The constitutionality of bans on such marriages is likely to be an issue before the Supreme Court in the new Term that opens in October.
