Links roundup: Dec 3-9 (MD+WA marriages & the DOMA/Prop 8 announcement)

Another busy week in LGBTQ news cycle!  Shall we get right to it?

The fall-out from last week’s reparative therapy controversy is still coming down as the ban bill is momentarily blocked – singer Clay Aiken and the Huffington Post’s William Dameron weigh in on the issue with varying degrees of levity.  The Marriage Equality section saw a bump in story numbers with marriages starting in two of the three most recent states to grant this right to their gay citizens.  As per usual, the news that comes to us from around the world is both cheeringly progressive and medievally depressing with the two often being separated by only a few lines of latitude or longitude as with this example from North/Central America:  Mexico’s Supreme Court announces that its federal government must recognize the same-gender marriages performed in Mexico City, and Belize announces… that it will decide whether homosexuality should be legalized (or at least no longer equated with bestiality) next summer.

New sections this week (created as trends reveal themselves) include Transgender news; the DOMA/Prop 8 section; U.S. News, General; and non-holiday-related Religion.  After their announcement on Friday that @SCOTUS (as they’re known on Twitter) would hear arguments beginning next spring on both the constitutionality of DOMA and California’s Prop 8, speculation began flying fast and furious on what this “means” for the LGBTQ community.  The consensus among the informed seems to be “optimistic yet wary-shading-to-terrified.”  A number of commentaries and analyses from the SCOTUS Blog itself are included in this week’s roundup.  We all have to keep in mind that even if the outcomes for both are positive, the Supreme Court has the very real ability to make the decisions apply in only incredibly narrow cases.  In other words – these cases are the first to crack open the door, but we’re a long way from blowing down the walls.  The “swing vote” name to watch at the moment is Justice Anthony Kennedy.  IEA’s own Don Sherfick contributed a post to the roundup this week about what the SCOTUS decision means for Hoosiers in our fight against HJR-6 (Spoiler summary: We’re thrilled to have it as a indicator of national mood and a banner to wave demonstrating how continuing to deny rights to certain citizens will become a nightmare for our national-to-local court systems, but practically it changes nothing).

Personal favorites from this week’s roundup: The “On Being Witness to History” piece written by Washington governor Chris Gregoire, the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of transgenderism from its list of mental disorders, the article about improving conditions for LGBT Boomers (news on a related Bloomington-based initiative coming next week!), Notre Dame’s approval of an LGBT student organization, and the hilarious “Heterosexual Awareness” group that’s determined to fight for the rights of this poor, marginalized class so perpetually and unfairly persecuted for loving as their nature dictates!  Stay strong in the face of hateful legislation, discriminatory violence, and societal rejection, my (non-overlapping categories of) brothers & sisters!

- Megan