365gay.com - President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner signed Argentina’s gay marriage bill into law on Wednesday. It is the first Latin American nation to legalize gay marriage, and joins Canada as the only nations in the Americas with marriage equality.

Several jurisdictions in the Americas have gay marriage, such as Iowa, Massachusetts and Mexico City, but this does not compare to the seven European nations and South Africa that have full marriage equality.

Americas Quarterly speculates that the Americas are behind because of the strong influence of the Catholic Church.

Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic all have constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and Bolivia’s new constitution limits legally recognized marriage to unions between a man and a woman. In Costa Rica, the Supreme Court ruled against gay marriage.

Americas Quarterly analyzed data from the American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) survey which includes data from 42,238 respondents from 25 nations in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.
The survey asked, “How strongly do you approve or disapprove of same-sex couples having the right to marry?” on a scale from one to ten (ten meaning “strongly approve.”)