Jose Maria Di Bello and his partner Alex Freyre won the right to get married when a judge ruled last week that a ban on gay marriage violates Argentina’s constitution.

“On December 1st we will become man and man,” said Di Bello, welling up in tears as a city clerk gave him the paperwork.

Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri said the city will not appeal – in effect inviting other same-sex couples to pursue their rights in court as well.

“We have to live with and accept this reality: the world is moving in this direction,” Macri said Friday, adding that it is important officials “safeguard the right of each person to freely choose with whom they want to form a couple and be happy.”

Freyre, 39, executive director of the Buenos Aires AIDS Foundation, and Di Bello, 41, an executive with the Argentine Red Cross, sued after being denied a license in April.

Their request was granted by Judge Gabriela Seijas, who said laws limiting marriage to “a man and a woman” violate constitutional rights of equality.

Argentina’s Congress is considering changing dozens of articles in the civil code to enable same-sex marriage. The proposal has support among ruling party lawmakers but President Cristina Fernandez has yet to take a stand. The Roman Catholic Church and other Christian groups are opposed.

Currently no country in Latin America allows gay marriage, though some jurisdictions allow gay partners to form civil unions with many of the same rights.

Seijas’ ruling sets no precedent beyond this case, but other gays and lesbians can cite it and hope for positive results in court if their requests for marriage licenses are denied.

“Ideally we want the bill to pass so that couples won’t have to resort to this type of action,” said Maria Rachid, president of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual Federation of Argentina.

Buenos Aires in 2002 became the first city in Latin America to allow same-sex civil unions, and Mexico City followed in 2007. Uruguay has legalized civil unions nationwide. In the Spanish-speaking world, Spain went further, legalizing same-sex marriage in 2005.

The men – both HIV positive – plan to marry on World AIDS Day at the same civil registry in the capital’s Palermo neighborhood. They told The Associated Press that marriage – and not just a civil union – is important to them because they want a shared health insurance policy and inheritance rights, among other things married couples now enjoy.

Gay and lesbian activists think so – and they have a growing number of supporters in Congress, which opened debate Thursday on whether to change dozens of laws that define marriage as a union between a “man and woman.”

“We can’t expect social equality if the state is legitimizing inequality,” said Maria Rachid, president of Argentina’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Federation. “We now have the social and political context necessary to change the law.”

It remains to be seen whether they have enough votes to overcome opposition from religious groups. The Roman Catholic Church remains a driving force in Argentina, where presidents were required to be both married and Catholic until a 1994 reform.

Some Catholic and evangelical Christian groups have accused the government of trying to subvert the natural order of life, promote perversions and destroy the family as an institution.

“This should not be understood as the denial of anyone’s rights,” said Archbishop Jose Maria Arancedo of Santa Fe, who took a gentler tone in a recent radio address. “It’s possible both to be progressive and to defend the family, founded on the institution of marriage.”

Argentina’s capital established its gay-friendly reputation in 2002 by becoming the first Latin American city to legalize same-sex civil unions. Four other Argentine cities later did the same, and such unions also now are recognized in Mexico City and some Mexican and Brazilian states. Uruguay alone has legalized civil unions nationwide.

Canada is the only nation in the Americas where gay marriage is now legal; in the Spanish-speaking world, only Spain has taken this additional step.

The capital’s civil unions law was initially celebrated as a huge victory for gay and lesbian rights, but such partnerships don’t confer many rights exclusive to married couples, such as the right to adopt children in the name of both parents, to enable a partner to gain citizenship and to inherit wealth or be included in insurance policies.

“A civil union is a link that grants certain rights, but not those available to a married couple, which only a national law can grant,” the bills’ co-sponsor, Rep. Vilma Ibarra, told The Associated Press. “This is the first round in a long process, but it is already a success to have it out there.”

Rachid said more than 20 lawmakers have signed on as supporters of same-sex marriage, and they believe they have enough votes in committee for a full vote in the lower house. It would then go to the Senate.

Rachid and her partner, Claudia Castro, were among the first same-sex couples in Buenos Aires to form a civil union – and the first to test Argentine law by applying for a marriage license in 2007. Their suit over the denial is pending at the Supreme Court.

“The opinion of religious leaders who dictate how other people should lead their lives should apply only to those who share their creed, and not to the rest of society,” Rachid said during an interview with Castro in the Buenos Aires apartment they share with their dog, Lola.

“We don’t need a law to define us as a couple – we’ve already been a couple for more than 10 years,” Castro added. “We just want to have equal rights.”

If the law passes, they plan to be first in line for a marriage license.

I know how the game is supposed to play. Show some moral outrage. Be shocked and appalled that Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican who had no problem voting against gay adoption when he was a U.S. senator congressman and was unequivocal in his opposition to gay marriage, got caught in some marital scandal. If I were a teenager still in the afterglow of a “Catcher in the Rye” high (I loathe that book), then indignation at hypocrisy would be called for. However, I haven’t seen my teenage years since Brothers Johnson ruled the radio.

The Sanford scandal is boring. Sure some of the details are rather juicy (seems to me he could have planned his Argentina trip with a smidgen more subterfuge), but infidelity is as common as dirt. As for the pretense, like Big Daddy noted that’s part of the human condition and I really can’t get bent out of shape when there is a glaring distinction between what a pol espouses and how she actually lives her life. That is not newsworthy, yet we as voters clutch the pearls when a politician admits some hot mess most of us have engaged in. No need to worry. I’m not sharing your secrets. And if you have been faithful to your lovah please don’t announce how you are a better spouse than Sanford.

This episode didn’t change my opinion about Sanford and I’m sure those getting the most pleasure out of his fall never gave him a dime or a vote. I would rather spend time critiquing his anti-adoption stance instead of getting some perverse pleasure out of failings that we all share.

Strengthening civilian control over the military has been a priority for President Cristina Fernandez and her husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, as Argentina struggles to heal old wounds from the 1976-83 dictatorship in which thousands were tortured and killed.

“We are still in a period of transition after the return to democracy, trying to advance in terms of our democratic institutions,” said Gaston Chillier, director of the Buenos Aires-based Center for Legal and Social Studies. His center represents families of victims of the military junta’s “dirty war” crackdown on dissent.

The new system places Argentina on par with international standards for military legal proceedings, said Defense Ministry spokesman Jorge Bernetti.

Signed into law last August, the measure brings the army, navy and air force under the same legal system as civilians – making soldiers accountable to civilian courts and hamstringing the military’s ability to delay trials to protect its own, Chillier said.

Some members of the armed forces are wary of ceding their autonomy, and see the move as a politically motivated push to weaken the military and punish crimes that are more than a generation old.

But Chillier said the new rules also guarantee important new rights for the rank-and-file.

For example, service members can now choose their own lawyer rather than being appointed one by the military. The measure also means troops are no longer subject to the death penalty and cannot be imprisoned for engaging in homosexual acts.

Dozens of former state security agents and their civilian allies are currently on trial for alleged crimes against humanity during the dirty war. At least 13,000 dissidents were killed or made to disappear during the crackdown, according to official figures. Human rights groups put that number around 30,000.

Couples must prove they have been living together for at least five years to receive the benefit, Amado Boudo, executive director of the national social security administration, told local television reporters.

The government’s national decree will “put the rights of all cohabitants on a level playing field,” Boudo said.

Gay activists welcomed Monday’s announcement as the fruition of years of campaigning the government to grant them the same rights as heterosexual married couples.

Gay civil unions already are legal in five cities, including Buenos Aires.

The measure is “historic” and marks a “step forward” for human rights because it is the first nationwide gay-rights measure approved by the government, gay activist Pedro Paradiso Sottile told The Associated Press.

“The government is moving past words to action,” said Sottile, an activist with the 24-year-old Argentine Homosexual Community organization in Buenos Aires.

Prior to the new decree, the deceased partners’ pensions went directly to the government.

“The state was stealing our money,” said Alejandra Portatadino, also a member of the Argentine Homosexual Community, calling the previous law “discriminatory” and “anti-constitutional.”

The organization will now focus efforts on nationalizing civil unions, which would confer additional rights to gay couples, such as adoption and inheritance, Sottile said.

Buenos Aires was the first Latin American capital city to legalize gay civil unions in 2002. Since then, the Argentine capital has become one of the hotspots on the international gay-friendly tourist circuit, going head-to-head with Rio de Janeiro.

The soccer-crazed country was host last year to the first international gay world cup as well as the international gay tango festival.

An unidentified donor gave blood at a Cordoba city hospital in December, testing negative for HIV, Health Minister Oscar Gonzalez was quoted by Cordoba’s La Voz del Interior newspaper as saying.

When the donor returned in May to give blood again, tests came back positive for the virus – but the blood had already been distributed, the newspaper said, citing Gonzalez.

Officials alerted local hospitals, and two patients were this week found to have been infected after receiving blood transfusions from the donor, who likely contracted HIV shortly before he or she gave blood in December, Gonzalez said, according to the newspaper.

The newspaper did not identify the donor, the hospital or the infected patients, in line with a national law that that does not allow such information to be disclosed publicly.

A so-called “window period” of 16 to 22 days can pass between exposure to HIV and the time antibodies can be detected in a standard blood test. During that time, a person can be contagious.

As in the U.S., blood donors in Argentina are given an extensive questionnaire to limit high-risk donors, who officially include gay men who’ve had sex in the past five years, people who’ve had sex for money or drugs in the past five years, or used intravenous drugs recreationally during that time.

About 120,000 people are infected with HIV in Argentina, Latin America’s fourth-most populous nation, which also has the fourth-highest number of cases in the region, according to the U.N.