1. The U.S. Supreme Court announced this morning that they will not hear a case in New Mexico where a photography business said its rights were violated after refusing to shoot a same-sex wedding. The business was fined by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission for the incident, which then led to the lawsuit. Had the court taken up the case, it would have opened up the possibility of allowing discrimination against LGBT people on the basis of religion. The business was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a “bill mill” that was responsible for many of the “religious freedom” bills introduced across the country earlier this year which all failed to pass save for one in Mississippi.
2. “Something remarkable has happened — something that’s mostly exciting but also a little disturbing.” Openly gay New York Times columnist Frank Bruni is up with a column on “The New Gay Orthodoxy.”
3. Oral arguments begin Thursday in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Kitchen v. Herbert, which is to debate the lower court’s decision to legalize gay marriage in Utah earlier this year (later stayed upon appeal). The AP has the unlikely story of the couple at the center of the case.
4. A lesbian South Dakota couple has announced that, after their legal marriage in Minnesota later this month, they will come back home and apply for a name change using their new marriage license. Assuming they will be denied, they then plan on filing suit challenging the state’s 2006 amendment banning gay marriage. That would leave just four states with no marriage lawsuits: Georgia, Alaska, North Dakota and Montana.
5. Popular election and baseball statistician and writer Nate Silver (who also happens to be gay) has a story about the rarity of anti-gay donations in Silicon Valley up on his new site, fivethirtyeight.com. This is of course a follow-up to last week’s resignation by Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, whose 2008 donation to the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 campaign caused an uproar.
(photo via Baltimore Sun)