A long-bubbling controversy over same-sex marriages quickly boiled over into a rash of court and legislative battles around the country in March, Catholic News Service reported.

California's Supreme Court ordered an immediate halt to same-sex weddings in San Francisco March 11, the same day the Massachusetts Legislature was meeting jointly to hash out a possible state constitutional amendment on the topic.

In California, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously March 11 to order a halt to same-sex marriages in San Francisco, a month after Mayor Gavin Newsom started the practice in defiance of state law.

"The issue is not a matter of civil rights," the San Francisco Archdiocese said in a statement on the court ruling. "It is a matter of preserving the definition of marriage --- a union between one man and one woman, which has benefited society for millennia."

Three weeks earlier San Francisco Archbishop William J. Levada wrote to President Bush urging a federal constitutional amendment to protect the traditional definition of marriage.

"Given the judicial activism in Massachusetts and the 'mayoral' activism in San Francisco, it seems to many of your fellow citizens that only a constitutional amendment can now assure that marriage between a woman and a man, and the family they raise, can remain into the future a foundational element of our society," Archbishop Levada wrote in his Feb. 19 letter.

Five days later Bush called for such a constitutional amendment, calling marriage between a man and a woman "the most fundamental institution of civilization."

Also in California, Assemblyman Mark Leno of San Francisco has introduced a bill into the state Legislature that seeks to legalize same-sex marriages by substituting gender-neutral terms "person" and "persons" for the man-woman and male-female language in the state's current legal definition of marriage.

The bill, sharply opposed by the California Catholic Conference and other advocates of traditional marriage, seeks to marginalize Proposition 22, approved by California voters in 2000, by saying its recognition of a valid marriage solely as the union of a man and a woman applies only to marriages outside California.