The Boston-based legal advocacy group that helped make gay marriage a fact of life in Massachusetts is girding for a fight to expand the rights of same-sex married couples.
Carissa Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the group that won the landmark 2003 state Supreme Judicial Court case legalizing gay marriage, said GLAD is taking aim at the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. The statute says no state need recognize gay marriages from another state and denies hundreds of federal benefits to same-sex spouses.
GLAD has not decided whether to file a lawsuit or urge Congress to repeal the act, she said. But she said the group is targeting the provision that denies federal recognition of wedded same-sex couples and is not trying to expand gay marriage beyond traditionally liberal New England, where GLAD has brought suits and lobbied at state houses....
How come that Massachusetts is an overwhelmingly Catholic state? Wasn't Massachusetts founded by the Puritan pilgrim fathers? How did it become a catholic state? Do you have any detailed statistics on the religious affiliations of the population in the different US-States? I am very interested to learn more about in which US-states Roman Catholicism is particularly strong or absent.
Well, being an overwhelmingly Catholic state we can't expect that Mass. would do something sensible like adding this to their constitution.
"Only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in Nebraska. The uniting of two persons of the same sex in a civil union, domestic partnership or other similar same-sex relationship shall not be valid or recognized in Nebraska."
Naturally, as was pointed out to me by Albert queer combinations aren't natural and can't be called marriages.
Paul Washer | 2/17/2011
COMMENTS | 
jim lincoln from nebraska: "right, chris, a devout catholic can never be a saint,..."
