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21 gay couples were married in upstate New York Friday, and 350 more couples were on a waiting list by the end of the day. The New York state Attorney General declined to take action, and an aide said the A.G. personally believed gay marriage should be legal. However, legality of the vows is in question because the town clerk of New Paltz refused to grant marriages licenses.

Another NY Times article looked at conservative Christian support for a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage and found support surprisingly soft. One man said he was ambivalent because he had a gay friend, while another said, "If there was a gay lifeguard, and I was drowning and couuld not swim, send the lifeguard." (Curiously, that quote was cut from later online editions of the story -- perhaps the man who was quoted starting getting jokes about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation -- but you can find it if you search "gay" and "drowning" on Google News, and it is in the West Coast print edition.)

Meanwhile, the Bush administration "has taken its first bureaucratic poke at" the legality of San Francisco's same-sex marriages, denying requests for name changes in Social Security records.