"The Spanish Parliament voted Thursday [June 30, 2005] to legalize gay marriage, giving final approval to a bill that would make Spain, a predominantly Catholic country, the first nation to eliminate all legal distinctions between same-sex and heterosexual unions, according to supporters of the measure.

The bill, passed 187 to 147, says couples will have the same rights, including the freedom to marry and to adopt children, regardless of gender.

Three other countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada, have voted to legalize gay marriage. But only Canada's laws, which do not yet apply to all of the country, contain language as liberal as Spain's, according to advocates of the law.

...But the [Catholic] church was unable to rally enough support to derail the bill, though 80 percent of Spaniards identify themselves as Catholic.

...Polls show that 55 to 65 percent of Spaniards support gay marriage."

(Source:  Renwick McLean, "Spain Legalizes Gay Marriage; Law Is Among the Most Liberal," The New York Times, July 1, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/international/europe/01spain.html?fta=y .)

"The United Church of Christ became the first mainline Christian denomination to support same-sex marriage officially when its general synod passed a resolution on Monday affirming 'equal marriage rights for couples regardless of gender.'

The resolution was adopted in the face of efforts to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. It was both a theological statement and a protest against discrimination, said the Rev. John H. Thomas, the president and general minister of the denomination, which has 6,000 congregations and 1.3 million members.

"On this July 4, the United Church of Christ has courageously acted to declare freedom, affirming marriage equality, affirming the civil rights of gay - of same-gender - couples to have their relationships recognized as marriages by the state, and encouraging our local churches to celebrate those marriages,' Mr. Thomas said at a news conference after the vote by the General Synod."

(Source:  Shaila Dewan, "United Church of Christ Backs Same-Sex Marriage," The New York Times, July 5, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/national/05church.html?th&emc=th .)

Homosexual activists have found the national media more than willing to promulgate reassuring images of wonderfully harmonious same-sex couples.  A new study of domestic violence, however, suggests that homosexual relations are far less pacific than activists are willing to acknowledge.

Published in Psychological Reports by researchers at Radford University, the new study analyzes data from a pilot survey designed to measure levels of domestic violence among same-sex couples.  Among the same-sex couples surveyed, a remarkable 56% reported that "they had experienced one or more ... forms of domestic violence."  

Further parsing of the data established that for homosexual men "intimate physical violence is a greater problem ... than [for] heterosexual men" (p < 0.001).   The researchers further determined that intimate physical violence is at least as great a problem for homosexual women as it is for heterosexual women.  (Homosexual women reported a prevalence of intimate physical violence slightly above that reported by heterosexual women, but the difference was not statistically significant.)

The authors of the new study are not surprised by their findings; indeed, they interpret these findings as part of a pattern in which "repeated studies continue to find that same-sex domestic violence is a fairly prevalent problem."