In a 5-4 opinion, the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ruled in favor of a law preventing gay couples from adopting children together. The majority essentially ceded responsibility to the legislature, writing that the Court “does not have a constitutional obligation to award this relationship the same rights that other relationships have when it comes to adoption procedures.”

The couple that challenged the ban has been together 20 years, and the petitioning mother has fought for the past eight to adopt the 12-year-old daughter they are raising together. The daughter proudly proclaims, “I have two mothers,” but she could not benefit from her one mother’s medical insurance or a possible will, nor could she stay with her second mom if her birth mother dies. Chief Justice Federico Hernandez Denton dissented from the ruling, invoking President Obama’s inaugural address calling for equality for gays and lesbians:

DENTON: Both (women) have ideal emotional skills, intuition and protective instinct to guarantee the girl’s full and healthy development. In addition, tests showed that (the girl) is mentally stable, does exceptionally well in school and gets along very well with children her age. [...]

While the rest of the world keeps opening its doors to the legitimate complaints of human beings discriminated against for their sexual orientation, the majority of this court refuses to declare the law in question as unconstitutional.

On Monday, over 200,000 Puerto Ricans protested against LGBT equality, suggesting the legislature may not have a lot of motivation to protect families like the couple in this case.

The Puerto Rican Senate recently approved a bill that “could eliminate LGBT-specific categories from the island’s hate crimes law” and now the House is expected to take up the measure, the blog Boy In Bushwick is reporting:

The Puerto Rico Senate late last month approved a provision that would eliminate sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, ethnicity and religion from the current statute—political status, age and disability would remain. The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the amended penal code during a special legislative session.

Representative Héctor Ferrer, Sen. Eduardo Bhatia and LGBT and Dominican activists blasted the proposed provisions earlier on Sunday, Dec. 4. “It’s an outrage and now we’re calling upon the House to restore this to where it should be,” said Pedro Julio Serrano of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

The island enacted hate crimes legislation in 2002, covering crimes based on sexual orientation or gender identity, but activists say that authorities are ignoring the measure. Justice Secretary Guillermo Somoza said his office’s special task force on hate crimes found there “have been 23 murders of gays and transgender people since the fall of 2009,” an underestimate given that the police often fail to classify anti-LGBT hate crimes as such. Under the measure, if someone “is found guilty of a hate crime they automatically face the maximum sentence for the underlying offense. If the offense is murder, it means life in prison.”