SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – With weeks to go before a judge might shut down San Francisco’s parade of marriage for gays and lesbians, city officials kept their experiment going and challenged President Bush to consider the real human beings who are finally being allowed to share the same civil rights that heterosexual couples enjoy.

The city reported that a grand total of more than 3,000 new sets of gay and lesbian newlyweds as local officials opted to defend their actions in court rather than stop the wedding march.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said that the city would continue its unprecedented challenge on behalf of gays and lesbians.

As the weddings went on with increasingly routine efficiency in San Francisco’s City Hall, the city’s brazen act rippled across the country to Washington, D.C., where President Bush made plans to introduce a proposed constitutional amendment to ban marriage for gays and lesbians.

Newsom responded to Bush’s statement by repeating that California’s constitution prohibits him from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. And he urged the president to see the human faces involved in the city’s new marriage policy, inviting him to meet the veteran lesbian activists who were the first couple to be wed with the city’s blessing Feb. 12.

“I ask the President to meet Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin and discuss with them why they simply want the same rights as a couple of 51 years that my wife and I enjoy today,” Newsom said in a statement.

Two groups have led the legal opposition to San Francisco’s new marriage policy – the Campaign for California Families and a group formed to support Proposition 22, the ballot measure California voters approved in 2000 that says the state will only recognize marriages between a man and a woman as valid.

Attorney Benjamin Bull, representing the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the group decided not to immediately appeal Warren’s ruling, figuring that he’ll ultimately rule in their favor.

“I suspect, given the local political climate, that he was just being very careful about not offending the sensitivities of the proponents of same-sex marriage in San Francisco,” Bull said.

Some independent constitutional scholars agreed that the courts will eventually declare that the city can’t contravene state law.

“Down the road, in the not too distant future, it’s going to be decided that Mayor Newsom overstepped his authority,” said Lawrence Levine of the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, an expert on sexual orientation and the law.

In any event, state officials say they won’t officially record any marriage certificates that have been altered in any way from the standard state form. For gay and lesbian couples, San Francisco officials replaced “bride” and “groom” with “first applicant” and “second applicant.”

“We do not validate or invalidate the marriage. It would simply not be recorded or registered with the state,” California Health and Human Services Agency spokeswoman Nicole Kasabian Evans reiterated. “Our role is ministerial in nature.”

Evans said counties have up to 90 days to send their forms to the state and that her agency hasn’t yet received any of the altered marriage license forms from San Francisco.

The situation remained confusing, even to the veteran bureaucrats involved. Evans, for example, said she didn’t know whether the state’s rejection of the forms would have any effect on the legal status of the same-sex unions created with the city’s blessing since Feb. 12.

Several family law attorneys also said they did not know whether marriage forms need to be recorded with the state to be considered valid.

Despite all the political and legal questions, the gay and lesbian couples who flocked to City Hall to marry said there was nothing the politicians or courts could do – at least yet – to inhibit their joy.

“Even if we are married for only 10 minutes, we are married,” said Tracey Turner, 39, of Yuba City, Calif., after she and her partner, Teira Taylor, 26, tied the knot. “Our certificate is recorded with the city and no one can take that away from us.”