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"California law does provide that anyone registering a domestic partnership with the State must certify that they are not currently married, as of the time of entering the domestic partnership. And it also provides that a domestic partnership is terminated if one of the partners gets married during it. However, that was written in the expectation that the marriage would be to an opposite-gender partner, and not to the DP partner. How that would be played out and interpreted by courts, if the marriage is to the DP partner, remains to be seen. It would only become an issue if the partners had some dispute, and it became relevant whether they were technically married or technically DP's. It would be up to a court to figure out which one applied. That is all assuming that the courts will eventually permit and validate what San Francisco is doing. It is not clear that they will, and it's not clear they won't. Who knows. On the other hand: the National Center for Lesbian Rights says that people who marry in San Francisco should also register as domestic partners with the State of California, so that they are guaranteed at least one of the sets of legal rights: either they will be treated as married, or treated as DPs, but they won't be treated as unrelated people anymore. Also note: California law requires that to be married, people must not already be married. If people are married under the law of Canada, for instance, they should not also get married in San Francisco, because that would void the marriage in Canada."
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