Same-sex marriage in Belgium 14 December and published on 23 December 1999 made the Act of statutory cohabitation go into effect on 1 January 2000. During 1999, the PS (French-speaking Social Democrats) and Ecolo (French-speaking Greens) also announced they agreed to legalise same-sex marriage. At that point, the only remaining party in Government that opposed same-sex marriage was the French-speaking liberal PRL (later merged into MR), mainly because it was opposed to adoption rights for same-sex couples. PRL agreed not to block same-sex marriage if adoption rights are excluded. As the first same-sex marriage in the Netherlands was performed on 1 April 2001, the
Same-sex marriage in New England not judicial review. The vote came nine years after Vermont adopted its "first-in-the-nation" civil unions law in 2000, which was the first place in the United States to extend full legal recognition to same-sex couples. (Several states and cities already had "domestic partnership" registries prior to this point.) A bill to allow same-sex marriage in Maine was signed into law on May 6, 2009. Maine was the fifth U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage, and the second to legislate it. The governor also became the first in the nation to sign a same-sex marriage bill that was not the result