A trial court in Canada’s Yukon Territory ordered the government to give a gay couple a marriage license July 14.

Territorial Premier Dennis Fentie accepted the ruling and said there would be no appeal.

Rob Edge and Stephen Dunbar married three days later.

The court redefined marriage in the Yukon as the voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of all others, and declared the old definition “unconstitutional.”

“Hopefully someday nobody will question why same-sex couples want to marry – they’ll know it’s for the same reasons as everyone else,” Edge said.

The court said it is “inconsistent” for the federal government not already to have legalized same-sex marriage in the Yukon given that it chose not to challenge top-court decisions that legalized same-sex marriage in the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec over the past 14 months, and that it has announced plans to rewrite federal marriage law to include same-sex couples.

“The judge agreed that justice delayed is justice denied,” said Martha McCarthy, who represented same-sex couples in the Ontario and Quebec marriage challenges. “He rejected the federal government’s arguments that courts should stand idly by while [the federal] Parliament waits for the [Canadian] Supreme Court” to answer some questions regarding same-sex marriage that Parliament asked it to consider.

“This ruling sends a message that governments across the country must now accept the ... right of same-sex couples to marry in a civil ceremony,” said Laurie Arron, director of advocacy for the national gay lobby group Égale. “It is simply unacceptable to maintain the fiction that capacity to marry, which is federal law, is different from one province or territory to the next. There is one law for the whole country, and that law includes same-sex couples. Governments who don’t accept that are leaving themselves open to legal challenges and liability for costs.”

The latest poll numbers show that 57 percent of Canadians approve of full same-sex marriage and 38 percent oppose it.

Gay couples attended mass at the Catholic cathedral in Bogotá, Colombia, July 4 wearing T-shirts denouncing Vatican homophobia.

Fellow worshippers responded with surprise or hostility, reports said.

“Homophobia is not Christian,” the shirts said.

Gayness is “a fact of nature that no human can change,” said one of the protesters, Gabriel Medina.

More than 300 people marched in the gay pride parade in Caracas, Venezuela, July 11.

They carried balloons, rainbow flags and signs denouncing mistreatment of gays and bisexuals by police and TV broadcasters.

Jesús Medina, of the organizing group Lambda, said activists also seek access to marriage and want a “national advocate” for homosexuals within the office of the People’s Advocate.

The campaign by the British gay group OutRage! to halt concerts by Jamaican dance-hall music stars who advocate the murder of gay people is escalating across Europe.

Bounty Killer’s planned performance at the Krakrock Festival in Avelgem, Belgium, in September has been canceled due to the artist’s violent antigay lyrics.

“Hateful people are not welcome at the festival,” said organizer Bert Breda.

In late June, two other Jamaican singers, Beenie Man and Capleton, were allowed to perform at Brussels’ Couleur Café Festival only after they promised not to use homophobic lyrics. Both singers were threatened with arrest under Belgium’s hate-crime laws if they broke their vows.

Beenie Man’s June 24 concert at the London nightclub Ocean was canceled after club owners expressed “concerns for public safety following discussions with Metropolitan Police” about the artist’s lyrics, which urge listeners to kill gay men.

South African gay groups filed an action in the Johannesburg High Court July 8 to overturn the common-law definition of marriage, which allows only for opposite-sex unions.

South Africa’s constitution is one of only a few in the world that explicitly ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

While South African laws and court rulings are considered to be some of the most gay-friendly on the planet, it is generally acknowledged that societal attitudes toward homosexuality have not evolved at the same pace.

Cruisy toilets along a highway in Wales were demolished by officials of the Welsh Assembly Government due to distress over men using them for “cottaging,” as tea-room cruising is called in the United Kingdom.

The bathrooms were at a picnic site off the A449 highway between Newport and Usk in Monmouthshire, the icWales website reported July 9.

Toilets that are structurally less-friendly to sexual hookups may be built in a few months, the report said.