On Wednesday Mexico’s Supreme Court struck a huge blow in the fight for marriage equality by ruling that bans on same-sex marriage are inherently “discriminatory” laws. The ruling came down in response to a lawsuit filed by a gay couple challenging the family code of Sinaloa, a coastal Mexican state.

(Just to north of Vallarta  and  Nayarit).

Sinaloa’s family code, like those in other Latin American countries have traditionally defined marriage as the union between a man and a woman. The lawsuit challenging the code, which was filed in 2013, contended that aside from gender there were no discernible differences between heterosexual couples and homosexual ones. In a public statement released after the court hearing the judges emphatically agreed.

“The contested provisions are clearly discriminatory because the relationships in which homosexual couples engage can fit perfectly into the actual fundamentals of marriage and living together and raising a family,” the court explained. “For all of those relevant effects, homosexual couples can find themselves in an equivalent situation to heterosexual couples, in such a way that their exclusion from both institutions is totally unjustified.”