Presidential candidate Barack Obama dishes with The Advocate.- Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton dishes with Ellen.
- The Arizona House Judiciary Committee voted on a state constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman. It now goes to the full House, and if approved, the Senate.
- The trial begins Monday for two lesbians who staged a sit-in at the Denver Clerk and Recorder Office after being denied a marriage license. The couple could face prison time.
- A Florida Senate committee passed legislation that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. State Senator Jeff Atwater, in line to become the next Senate President, became a major co-sponsor of the bill.
- A U.S. District judge threw out a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the Okeechobee, Florida school district over its refusal to allow a Gay-Straight Alliance to meet on campus. He said the case had become moot because the club was now without members after the original club president graduated. He rejected the attempt of two students to revive the club and have their names added to the suit.
- The Christian Civic League of Maine is pushing for a referendum that would limit marriage would be limited to opposite-sex couples, prohibit civil unions, ban same-sex couples from adopting, remove sexual orientation from the Maine Human Rights Act and eliminate funding for the civil rights teams in the Attorney General’s Office.
- The Maryland House of Delegates followed the state Senate and approved a bill to allow same- or opposite-sex domestic partners to make medical or funeral decisions for each other if they can show they are a committed couple. The bill now heads to the governor.
- The Detroit City Council passed an ordinance banning discrimination against transgender people.
- Steven Scarborough, 22, who killed Victor Manious, a 62-year-old man from Michigan, used the “gay panic” defense to have felony murder charges reduced to voluntary manslaughter, giving him a maximum of 15 years rather than life in prison.
- New York Governor David Paterson told a crowd at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s New York Leadership Awards that he would “push on until we bring full marriage equality to New York state.”
- PFLAG released recordings made (with permission) of their conversation with Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern. The recordings prove that PFLAG did not
- Pennsylvania state lawmakers heard testimony on a proposed state constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
Around the world:
- The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) released an updated map of LGBT rights around the world.
- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper refused to discipline MP Tom Lukiwski over a homophobic slur he made 16 years ago, and which has just come to light. Senator Nancy Ruth, the only openly gay member of the Conservative caucus, says that an apology is not good enough, and wants action taken against Lukiwski.
- LGBT-rights activists in Alberta, Canada, want the province to include gay people in the provincial human-rights code. It is the only province not to have done so.
- China’s best-known gay and AIDS activist says the repression and intimidation of human rights activists and dissidents in advance of the Beijing Olympics has also targeted gay people.
- The Tel Aviv District Court is hearing the case of two women who did exactly what my partner and I did to conceive our child: use one woman’s egg, fertilized with anonymous donor sperm, and implanted into the other woman’s uterus. The Israeli Attorney General argues that the woman whose egg they used must adopt her own genetic child. (In our case, the state of New Jersey said I didn’t need to do that, and could be put on our child’s original birth certificate; this was long before the state recognized both mothers as a matter of course.)
- Two women in Kaduna, Nigeria have been sentenced to six months in prison and 20 lashes each for having a lesbian relationship.
