Attorneys say gay marriages likely not recognized in North Dakota
Associated Press

FARGO, N.D. - Same-sex marriages in Massachusetts probably would not be recognized in North Dakota under the state's current law, attorneys say.

North Dakota defines marriage as a civil contract between one man and one woman. Neighboring Minnesota prohibits marriages of the same sex, even if they are recognized by another state.

Massachusetts has became the first state to conduct same-sex marriages. Opponents are seeking to change that state's constitution to ban them.

"That's really the next big area - what's going to happen?" said Bob Uebel of Pride Collective, a Moorhead, Minn.-based advocacy group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. "There isn't an answer right now."


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Losing Its Nonchalance, France Feuds Over Gay Vows
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS, May 19 - Until recently, the French assumed they had solved the issue of gays and marriage in a most civilized manner.The raw political debates and the spectacle of same-sex weddings in the United States were little more than a source of bemusement, what a Frenchman might call "a tempest in a glass of water."

After all, the French were the inventors of the Civil Solidarity Pact, a creative legal mechanism introduced in 1999 that gives all adult couples - regardless of gender or sexual orientation -- many of the same fiscal and social rights as those who are formally wedded.

But that was before Noël Mamère, the leader of France's tiny leftist Green Party and a member of Parliament, announced last month that he would defy tradition (and some would say the law) by officiating at the country's first gay wedding ceremony.

Like many French politicians, Mr. Mamère holds multiple offices. So he is using his perch as mayor of an obscure southwest town named Bègles to conduct his social experiment, joining two thirty-something men, a supermarket clerk and a health-care worker, in marriage on June 5.