Judge rejects Maryland law banning same-sex marriages

BALTIMORE – A judge on Friday struck down a 33-year-old Maryland law against same-sex marriage, agreeing with 19 gay men and women that it violates the state constitution’s guarantee of equal rights.

The ruling by Judge M. Brooke Murdock rejected a state argument that the government had a legitimate interest in protecting the traditional family unit of heterosexual parents.

“Although tradition and societal values are important, they cannot be given so much weight that they alone will justify a discriminatory” law, she wrote.

The judge immediately stayed her order to give the state time to file an expected appeal in Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed in 2004 by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of nine couples and a man whose partner died. It named court clerks in Baltimore city and Prince George’s, St. Mary’s, Dorchester and Washington counties as defendants and challenged a 1973 state law specifying that marriage is a union of one man and one woman.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers said the ban violates equal rights guaranteed by the state constitution.

Murdock agreed with the plaintiffs, writing that she was “unable to find that preventing same-sex marriage rationally relates to Maryland’s interest in promoting the best interests of children.”