NewsWrap for the week ending February 28, 2015

SUMMARY

Still Soviet After All These Years - Kazakhstan’s Senate approves a “no promo homo” bill …

Equality Watch - a Swiss legislative panel overwhelmingly votes to advance a marriage equality proposal …

Native Intelligence - the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska has become at least the 11th Native American group in the U.S. to open civil marriage to same-gender couples …

Faith in Hate - Northern Ireland’s politically-powerful Roman Catholic Church pushes for an LGBT bias-enabling “religious freedom” bill …

Discrimination Liberation - religious exemption measures are percolating in more than a dozen U.S. states, most recently advancing in the North Carolina and Indiana Senates, but surprisingly opposed by former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers and quashed in Arkansas …

State of Rebellion - the Arkansas bill to ban local anti-bias ordinances that don’t comport with state law will officially take effect in September, but Little Rock leads at least three Arkansas cities that have defied the ban or plan to, and an Arkansas-like "no local anti-bias bills" bill is killed in West Virginia …

Judge Bad Penny - Don Davis, the same Mobile, Alabama probate judge who was forced by a direct court order to issue a marriage license to Kim McKeand and Cari Searcy, the lesbian couple who successfully sued the state for marriage equality, refuses to grant Searcy’s second-parent adoption application for the son born to McKean in 2006 and being raised by both women …

Three's the Charm - the U.K. becomes the first country in the world to allow in-vitro fertilization clinics to replace defective DNA in one woman’s egg with healthy DNA from another’s, which will virtually result in 3-parent babies - a dad and two moms …

X Marks the Spot - while the Human Rights Campaign, Americans for the Separation of Church and State, and the AARP(!) are on the American Family Association’s "hit list," the Center for Inquiry, which supports the rights of Christians, atheists and others, is miffed at not being included in the way-far-right group’s “bigotry map” identifying organizations around the U.S. that “openly display bigotry toward the Christian faith”  ….

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