“Girls Gone Wild” Founder Joe Francis Engaged To Wed CBS News’ Christina McLarty

While Paris Hilton is heating up the Google searches this Friday for smoking the ganja out in South Africa, her pot-smokin’ chum Joe Francis is in the headlines for an entirely different reason.

The Girls Gone Wild founder — who never met an inebriated twentysomething he didn’t want to disrobe and exploit — is getting hitched to celebrity news reporter Christina McLarty, his on-again/off-again girlfriend of nearly four years.

The soft porn magnate and notorious tax cheat, 37, proposed to the CBS News Entertainment Reporter while on vacation in St. Tropez this week.

“We have chosen to have a civil domestic partnership because we don’t believe it’s appropriate to be married until our gay and lesbian friends are afforded the same rights as us to legally marry in the United States,” Francis told The New York Post’s PageSix Column on Friday.

When quizzed for the details on the engagement ring, Francis said that they are “having one made.”

The couple are planning to wed in the company of 200 guests at Casa Aramara, the groom’s beachfront estate in Punta Mita, Mexico, this September. Neighbor Quincy Jones will reportedly serve as best man.