Gay marriage on the way
On 21 December Mexico City's assembly voted to legalise gay marriage. The first gay marriage is likely to take place in March, activists say.
The Roman Catholic Church is vehemently opposed to such social liberalisation and put pressure on the mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, to veto the move. Ebrard refused to buckle and signed the new law just before the end of 2009.
Mexico City also has the most liberal laws on abortion in the country. A row between church and state over social policy will polarise Mexican politics even further: last week Enrique Peña Nieto, the governor of the country's biggest state, the Estado de México, made a very public pitch for the Catholic vote with a heavily publicised audience with the Pope in Rome.
Peña Nieto and Ebrard, a left winger, are likely contenders for the presidency in 2012. The residual anti-clericalism of Mexican reformers is matched by the strident Catholicism of a lot of the Right. The final convulsion of the Mexican Revolution pitched Catholics against the reformers in the Cristero Revolt in the west of Mexico in the late 1920s.
The cardinal archbishop of Mexico City, Norberto Rivera, is opposing gay marriage because he (and the Roman Catholic Church) objects to the principle that gay couples should be able to adopt children just as other married couples do. The Mexico City reform specifically gave gay married couples the same adoption rights as heterosexual married couples.
Some Mexico City politicians are threatening to go to the supreme court to block the reform.
- Abortion
The Academia Mexicana de Ciencas (AMC), the country's main forum for scientists, stated on 5 January that it was worried by the “unacceptable regressive phenomenon" of the criminalisation of abortion in 18 of Mexico's 32 states. The AMC said that the moves threatened women's rights. The president of the AMC, Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, claimed that Mexico had “gone backwards in economic development, socially, politically and in terms of human development" in the past few years.