A federal district judge in Puerto Rico has upheld Puerto Rico's ban on marriages of same-sex couples (today). Actually, the judge dismissed the case because he believes that Baker v Nelson is precedent. Lambda Legal attorneys say that they will appeal the ruling. The appeal will go to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
To my knowledge, this is only the second federal district judge to allow a marriage ban to remain in place (the first one was from Louisiana -- it's before the Fifth Circuit now) since Windsor. There have been over forty rulings in favor of the freedom to marry.
After Lambda Legal appeals this ruling, we will have pending marriage equality cases at the US Courts of Appeal for the First, Fifth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits.
From the Washington Post:
United States District Judge Juan Perez-Gimenez has dismissed a challenge to Puerto Rico’s law limiting marriage to one man and one woman. He 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. The decision heightens anticipation of what other judges now considering same-sex marriage cases may do. Appointed by President Carter in 1979, Judge Perez-Gimenez also becomes the first Democrat-appointed judge to rule against same-sex marriage since Windsor.
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.