Welcome to The Morning Pride, ThinkProgress LGBT’s daily round-up of the latest in LGBT policy, politics, and some culture too! Here’s what we’re reading this morning, but please let us know what stories you’re following as well. Follow us all day on Twitter at @TPEquality.
- A New Mexico House committee voted to kill a bill that would have allowed a state referendum on marriage equality.
- The National Organization for Marriage is unsurprisingly partnering with the Catholic Bishops and Family Research Council to promote their anti-equality march when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8. Of course, equality activists are countering that march.
- Did Harvey Milk have an unofficial “marriage license” contract with Joe Scott Smith to be “lovers from this day on”?
- A woman claims she was fired from the Mars Chocolate candy company for being a lesbian and taking time off for her pregnancy.
- A new study confirms that gay men and straight women really do seem to relate more to each other.
- The freshly re-elected president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, used his acceptance speech on Sunday to apologize to the LGBT community for some offensive comments he made earlier this year.
- An Australian judge has ruled that the country’s ban on same-sex marriage is not sex discrimination.
- The couples challenging Proposition 8 have filed their final brief to the Supreme Court. The brief is a masterpiece of argument; here is a compelling excerpt:
Proponents accuse Plaintiffs (repeatedly) of “re-defining marriage.” But it is Proponents who have imagined (not from any of this Court’s decisions) a cramped definition of marriage as a utilitarian incentive devised by and put into service by the State—society’s way of channeling heterosexual potential parents into “responsible procreation.” In their 65-page brief about marriage in California, Proponents do not even mention the word “love.” They seem to have no understanding of the privacy, liberty, and associational values that underlie this Court’s recognition of marriage as a fundamental, personal right. Ignoring over a century of this Court’s declarations regarding the emotional bonding, societal commitment, and cultural status expressed by the institution of marriage, Proponents actually go so far as to argue that, without the potential for procreation, marriage might not “even . . . exist at all” and “there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex.” Indeed, Proponents’state-centric construct of marriage means that the State could constitutionally deny any infertile couple the right to marry, and could prohibit marriage altogether if it chose to pursue a society less committed to “responsible” procreation.
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