Gay couples in France will legally be able to marry as well as adopt children beginning in 2013, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Tuesday in a speech before Parliament.

We just received this tip from feminist writer/sex columnist Tristan Taormino, who was at Manhattan's City Hall this morning and spotted Alec Baldwin and fiancee Hilaria Thomas at the Clerk's office. What a town!:

The North African nation of Mali is in the midst of an uprising by strict conservative Islamist rebels who have captured Timbuktu and locked it down under harsh Sharia law and are running around with guns and making all the women wear veils and chasing off all the Westerners and generally just throwing a wrench into any fun summer bikini party plans that Timbuktuans may have had. This is all very troubling, we grant you, (LIP SERVICE ABOUT 'RIGHTS'). But the New York Times' excellent story yesterday on the situation really buried the scariest penalty of all that the cruel extremists are imposing on the not-even-allowed-to-fuck-casually citizenry:

Viewers of TLC's Sister Wives have just been robbed of a very juicy plotline: it was announced Thursday that Kody Brown and his four wives (listed in order of greatness: Meri, Christine, Janelle, and Robyn) won't be prosecuted for bigamy.

A few weeks ago, I created a profile and logged onto VKontakte, the most popular Russian-language social network. I entered some personal information, uploaded an especially flattering picture of myself, then used the search function to find all single women between 25 and 35 in Ukraine who were online at the moment — around 7:30 p.m. Ukraine time. There were more than 10,000 available, all sorted by a rating system which seemed to be directly proportional to the amount of pictures a woman had posted of herself in a string bikini, and how good she looked in said bikini.

All you need to know about the very latest trends here in the American Dream of USA of America™ is this: love is dead, marriage is an anachronism, the family has disintegrated, and all is chaos. But we're making good racial progress!

Right-wingers concerned with the sanctity of marriage should probably shift their focus from the gays to Jerry Lee Lewis, who recently got married for the seventh time. That in and of itself is shocking, but what's really unsettling is the family connection.

Ladies, make sure when you do get your man to put a ring on it, it's this 150 carat "world's first diamond ring." Asking him to plunk down $68 million is a good way to test him and his love for you.

A new government report says that 38% of American women aged 15-44 have never ever been married, not even once. What is wrong with them? Something. Nobody likes them? Apparently. Anyhow. They're not as hopeless as everyone thinks!

The Pew Research Center released the results of a study today that found the number of mixed race marriages has doubled in the United States in the past 30 years. The Pew website features a great summary of the report if you don't want to slog through all eight pages of data. Here are some of the most interesting findings, if you don't even want to slog through the summary.

Three years ago, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger were a middle-aged married couple co-writing Furious Love, a book about Liz Taylor and Richard Burton's scandalous extramarital affair on the set of Cleopatra.

Shrieking tabloid xenophobe and enemy of sluts Andrea Peyser really hates Valentine's Day. Haha, "shocker," right? Haha, "breaking news." Haha. But seriously guys.

Isakin Jonsson and Michelle Gustafsson announced they will marry in a small ceremony in the high security wing of the Karsuddens psychiatric facility in Sweden. An as-yet-undetermined member of the Church of Satan is expected to officiate.

Retiring Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank will marry his longtime partner Jim Ready, a handyman from Maine. Congratulations. Ready is known for being occasionally hilarious, like when he called a couple of drunk, harassing ophthalmologists "bitchy" on an airplane.

Atlantic City: the biggest shithole on the East Coast, where blocks of open-air crack markets immediately give way to cut-rate seedy casinos full of doomed and hopeless poverty-level day trippers in a geographic continuum of vice and despair unequaled anywhere in its chemical spill-laden state of New Jersey. Now it's easier to have your wedding there. Alert your spouse-to-be.

Singing labradoodle Justin Timberlake has reportedly (but not confirmedly) proposed to on-and-off girlfriend Jessica Biel, who reportedly said "yes."

Sinead O'Connor's most recent manic episode seems to be winding down: Over the holidays she announced that her recent "Cock. In. Mouth." marriage to therapist Barry Herridge had ended. The beginning of the end began "within 3 hours" of the duo's paparazzi-strewn Las Vegas ceremony, which took place in the back of a pink Cadillac outside the chapel where Elvis and Britney Spears married various significant others*:

Last week, in the wake of a hot-and-heavy extramarital affair with a male staffer and multiple reprimands from her own Republican party, Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch apologized and resigned.

The Nassau County Police Department has acknowledged in a court filing that Bill O'Reilly played a role in an internal affairs investigation into an NCPD detective, confirming a key element of Gawker's exclusive story last August detailing how the Fox News blowhard tried to have the cop who was dating his wife investigated by his own police department.

Are you married? Sucker. I mean, congratulations. Sucker. In olden times men and women would agree to be joined in matrimony forever—the men receiving a regular source of sexual congress and a valuable allegiance to powerful land-owning families in nearby regions, and the women receiving a new pot and pan. Today: married people are nearly a minority. So close!!!!