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Dominique Adamski and Francis Dekens have been dreaming of a June wedding for a long, long time. Adamski, 50, a psychotherapist, and Dekens, 58, a retired bank employee, have been together for 25 years. They were the first gay couple in France to officially register their partnership, in 1999, under the then controversial law setting up "civil solidarity pacts" (PaCS). Pushed through against strong conservative opposition by France's Socialist-led government, the PaCS law gave the couple some legal recognition, but not exactly the same rules on taxation and pensions that apply to married couples in France. Now they want to take the next step. "We want to be formally recognized as a couple," says Adamski. "Marriage, period. That's the contract that best protects our interests and best symbolizes our love."

And so on June 19, Williams Meric, the mayor of Marseillan, the little town on the Mediterranean coast where Adamski and Dekens live, will join the two in marriage. It will be a joyous day; it is also against French law. The Adamski-Dekens match is part of an argument over same-sex marriage that has spread through the developed world in recent months. Last week in Massachusetts, where gay marriage has been legal since May 17, the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown yielded to a request from the Governor to stop marrying out-of-staters. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard asked Parliament to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The discussion in France reaches a milestone this Saturday when Green Party leader Noël Mamère, in his capacity as mayor of the Bordeaux suburb of Bègles, will kick off the June season with France's first gay wedding by marrying Bertrand Charpentier, 31, a nurse's aide, and Stéphane Chapin, 33, a warehouse worker.

MOVING TOWARD MARRIAGE The State of Gay Union in Europe Registered Partnerships In 1989, Denmark became the first country to institute legislation granting registered same-sex partners the same rights as married couples. Adoption, artificial insemination and church weddings were not part of the deal, though by 1999, couples could adopt each other's children. Norway, Sweden and Iceland all enacted similar legislation in 1996, and Finland followed suit six years later. In 2001, Germany enacted a law that allows same-sex couples to register for "life partnerships," but a second act — promising equality on taxes, pensions and child custody — was rejected. Since 1999, France has granted cohabiting couples a form of legal partnership that (after a waiting period) gives them rights equivalent to married couples on taxation and immigration, but not on inheritance and adoption. Civil Marriage In April 2001, the Netherlands became the first to offer full civil marriage rights to gay couples. It imposed a three-year moratorium on adoptions, but recently dropped it, along with a ban on foreign adoptions, according to gay-rights activist Henk Krol. In January 2003, Belgium adopted a similar model, but without the adoption rights.

In a front-page piece in Le Monde last week, Mamère wrote that he was performing the wedding in order to use "provocation as a political tool." The Marseillan wedding will follow two weeks later, and at least two other French mayors have said they're willing to perform gay or lesbian marriages if asked.

A French public prosecutor last week faxed Mamère a warning against following through with the wedding, admonishing him that "as a person invested with public authority you should abstain from all initiatives destined to block the execution of the law." Mamère is undeterred. "This is a political initiative to reverse prejudice," he says. "It's in line with the Greens' orientation towards openness and equality." What better time to demonstrate that commitment, he says, than just before the June 10-13 elections for the European Parliament?

Same-sex legal partnerships — though not full-fledged marriages — were first approved in Europe in the Nordic countries. Fifteen years ago Denmark recognized "registered partnerships," which gave gay and lesbian couples rights equivalent to married couples in all matters but the right to adopt, or to receive artificial insemination. The famously tolerant Dutch surpassed the Scandinavians in April 2001 by jettisoning all distinctions between gay partnerships and traditional marriages. "In the Netherlands, we don't have gay marriage," says Henk Krol, an activist who was knighted by Queen Beatrix for his advocacy of gay rights. "We only have one marriage, civil, open to any couple."

Opinion polls attest to a growing acceptance of gay marriage — one recent poll (commissioned by Elle) in France found 64% of those questioned favored it. But for the Roman Catholic Church, it amounts to an abomination. The Vatican laid out its position against the trend in a 12-page judgment last summer, thundering that "there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and the family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law." Muslim authorities are as adamantly opposed to it, and in France the Protestant Church has expressed reservations.

Still, last year, predominantly (though only nominally) Catholic Belgium went almost as far as its northern neighbor, passing a law that gives all rights but adoption to homosexual couples. This summer the Belgian federal Parliament is expected to vote on a proposal to allow same-sex couples to adopt and, according to Socialist M.P. Karine Lalieux, it is likely to pass. "In Belgium we've been able to have a very serene discussion about this," she says. "There's been no need for someone to contravene the law of the land the way Mamère is doing in France." More surprising is the apparent serenity with which the topic is considered in Spain, despite the country's Catholic heritage. Last week Justice Minister Juan Fernando López Aguilar listed an initiative for gay marriage among proposed amendments to the Spanish penal code. A vote is expected in the National Assembly by early 2005.

There and elsewhere in Europe, the question of children — what the French call homoparentalité — may be the most difficult. In an interview last week in Le Monde, French Family Minister Marie-Josée Roig signaled that as open as the conservative government may be to alterations of the PaCS law to further equalize tax and inheritance rights, raising children within a same-sex union is another matter. "A man and a woman are necessary to have a baby — everything else is artifice," she told the paper. "Wanting a child is one thing, but it is the right of the child to flourish in the best conditions" — and in Roig's opinion, that means under the care of a man and a woman.

Germany and Norway have registered partnership laws that give some recognition to same-sex couples, but activists in both countries say they don't expect them to be expanded anytime soon. Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrat-Green government got a law on partnerships through in 2001, but a bill that would have treated same-sex partners the same as married couples on taxes, pensions and adoption stalled in the conservative-dominated Bundesrat. Even domestic partnerships remain off the agenda in Italy, where the Catholic Church's influence remains strongest.

Perhaps to defuse the issue, some politicians even question whether marriage is such a great idea in the first place. "Marriage has been a tragedy for heterosexuals," argues Vittorio Sgarbi, a gay marriage supporter and former Italian Culture Ministry official. Ségolène Royal, a French Socialist seen by many as a possible presidential candidate in 2007 (who lives, unmarried, with Socialist Party first secretary François Hollande and their four children), has avoided taking a position on the debate, which she says has taken "a disproportional place in relation to the central concerns of the French." She has said, however, that she finds it "paradoxical" that homosexuals would want to claim the right to "a traditional bourgeois structure" like marriage. But such arguments ignore the fact that homosexuals are simply asking for what heterosexuals have always had — the right to embrace or shun this "bourgeois structure" and not have a government make the decision for them.

Mamère's initiative has in any case given the political class in France something to chatter about. But it's hardly a major act of civil disobedience. The Green leader's legal advisors point out that the fine he faces for disobeying the prosecutor's warning comes to €4.50 — the modern equivalent of the 30 franc penalty set for such infractions in a 1946 revision of the Civil Code. That's one remnant of the past that advocates of gay marriage are not keen to see change.

• JAMES GRAFF | Paris
• Gay marriage comes to Europe