Boston ? In a disappointment for the gay rights movement, the state’s highest court ruled Thursday that same-sex couples from states where gay marriage is prohibited cannot tie the knot in Massachusetts.

Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican who is considering a run for president in 2008, welcomed the decision, saying he did not want Massachusetts to become “the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage.”

The Supreme Judicial Court upheld a 1913 state law that forbids nonresidents to marry in Massachusetts if their marriage would not be recognized in their home state.

If the court had struck down the law, Massachusetts would have been thrown open to gay couples from across the country to get married. Then they could have returned to their home states to fight for legal recognition for those marriages.

Massachusetts “has a significant interest in not meddling in matters in which another state, the one where a couple actually resides, has a paramount interest,” Justice Francis Spina wrote.

The state “can reasonably believe that nonresident same-sex couples primarily are coming to this commonwealth to marry because they want to evade the marriage laws of their home states, and that Massachusetts should not be encouraging such evasion.”

According to the Registry of Vital Records and Statistics, 7,341 gay couples tied the knot in Massachusetts between the first marriages in May 2004 and December 2005. The state does not track how many out-of-state couples were given licenses in Massachusetts.

Eight gay couples from surrounding states had challenged the 93-year-old law. Five of those eight couples received marriage licenses in Massachusetts before the governor ordered city and town clerks to enforce the 1913 law.

In Thursday’s ruling, six justices ruled against the gay couples in two separate opinions.