[Updated again: Now with Alabama and Virginia!] Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, and Texas all had positive news about marriage equality yesterday. Let’s round it all up. (I know: Nevada isn’t really part of the south, but it’s south of where I am, so grant me some poetic license here.)
Le Zbor, the first lesbian and feminist choir in southeastern Europe, has created a charming video “expressing its solidarity with the LGBT citizens of Russia and worldwide.” Watch the Croatian singers here:
Great news from Idaho this morning: The state Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a person can petition to do a second-parent adoption of another’s child, even if the two adults are not married.
A baby born in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the first to have three legal parents on her birth certificate under the province’s new law.
Yelena Goltsman is founder and co-president of RUSA LGBT, the association for Russian-speaking LGBT people in the U.S., and a leading voice speaking out for LGBT Russians. She didn’t plan to be an LGBT activist, though — and in fact came to the U.S. in 1990 because of anti-Jewish, not anti-LGBT, persecution, when she was still married to a man.
Here’s a sneak peek of Chevrolet’s ad that will run tonight during the Olympic opening ceremonies, featuring two-mom and two-dad families.
Google lit up the Internet last night with its not-so-subtle rainbow-colored Olympic doodle, quoting the non-discrimination section of the Olympic Charter below it. From what I can tell, based on reports from friends of friends, the doodle is visible by Google users in Russia, too. I’ve been working in social media and social justice for a long time, and I think Google’s move was one of the best-timed, best planned examples of how to use the former for the latter. Other companies are planning to air LGBT-inclusive commercials during the Games as well. But what will the impact of this be?
The Olympics start tonight, and I am going to be watching with mixed feelings: the love of a sports fan, and the concern of a member of the LGBT community. I shudder when I think that Russia may soon pass a bill that would allow the state to take children from parents for no reason other than that the parents are LGBT. The Family Equality Council is taking action, however, and asking people to send a message of love and support to LGBT people in Russia through the “To Sochi With Love” campaign.
Michael Morones is an 11-year-old boy living in North Carolina. He loves My Little Pony, in part because he has ACHD and relates to the character Pinkie Pie, an excitable pony. Schoolmates bullied him and called “gay” for liking a “girls'” program, however. He is now in critical condition in the hospital after a suicide attempt.
If you blinked, you might have missed them. But there, at 44 seconds in, two gay dads and their daughter roller skate across our screens in Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl commercial. A sign of progress and inclusion? Or a token gesture from a company sponsoring the Olympics in an LGBT-hostile country? My opinion is that for
