On same-sex marriage, New England is now united.

Rhode Island became the 10th U.S. state and final one in the region to make gay weddings legal, after its House of Representatives passed a bill expanding marriage rights to homosexuals. Governor Lincoln Chafee, a 60-year-old independent, has pushed the change since taking office in 2011 and signed the bill yesterday, shortly after its approval.

“I am proud and humbled to make the Marriage Equality Act the law of the land in Rhode Island,” Chafee said in a statement. “We would not be where we are today without the Rhode Islanders who for decades have fought for tolerance and freedom over discrimination and division.”

Chafee backed the measure as a way to spur the state’s economy. Rhode Island’s law takes effect Aug. 1.

Along with the five other New England states -- Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut -- same-sex marriages also are legal in Washington, Iowa, New York, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Similar measures are pending in Delaware, Illinois and Minnesota.

The law will make Rhode Island “a place that is welcoming to the younger generation, the creative generation, entrepreneurs,” Chafee said in an interview at Bloomberg News headquarters in New York this week.

“New England is now complete,” Marc Solomon, national campaign director at Freedom to Marry, a New York-based group that helps and funds local gay-rights organizations, said by telephone. “We have an entire region of the country that has approved the freedom to marry.”

No Surprise Frank Schubert, national political director for the National Organization for Marriage, a Washington-based group that fights same-sex marriage legislation around the country, said the loss for his side wasn’t a surprise.

“It is a heavily Catholic state, which is what helped us hold same-sex marriage off for so long,” Schubert said by e- mail. “It is also one of the most Democratic states.”

Rhode Island’s House, led by Representative Gordon D. Fox, a Democrat and the country’s first openly gay House speaker, passed a same-sex marriage measure by 51 to 19 in January. On April 24, the Senate approved a modified version by 26 to 12 that expanded protections for religious organizations. That change was approved in yesterday’s 56-15 vote.

All five Republicans in the 38-member Senate endorsed the proposal, marking the first time that a state Republican legislative caucus has unanimously done so, they said.

Generational Shift “We recognize that there is a national consensus building on this generational issue, and we are glad that support for the freedom to marry is growing within the Republican Party,” the caucus said in a statement last week.

Two years ago, Rhode Island’s legislature pulled back a gay-marriage bill and instead approved civil unions. The state has granted fewer than 100 of them since, according to the Health Department. Rhode Islanders United for Marriage, a local gay-rights group, has said the low rate stems partly from the state’s proximity to others where gay marriage was already legal.

Last May, Chafee signed an executive order recognizing same-sex marriages performed out of state.

To contact the reporter on this story: Annie Linskey in Boston at alinskey@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net

WASHINGTON — A majority of Supreme Court justices Wednesday appeared ready to declare unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act's definition of marriage for federal purposes as limited to one man and one woman.


Noting that a same-sex couple could be married in a state but remain unable to retrieve any of the multitude of federal marriage benefits, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Paul Clement, who was defending the law on behalf of the
House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, "What kind of marriage is this?"


Justice Anthony Kennedy appeared ready to side with the court's more liberal members, noting that the more than 1,100 federal marriage benefits showed the 1996 law's definitions affected the many ways the federal government is
"intertwined with the daily lives" of couples married under state law.


Although the justices spent the first half of Wednesday's argument discussing whether the court had jurisdiction to hear the case, few justices signaled any discomfort with deciding the underlying constitutional questions raised by the
case.


Edith Windsor's case was filed Nov. 9, 2010, and, though not the first challenge to the law, it was the one that the justices chose to review. Both the trial court and court of appeals agreed with Windsor, at which point the
decision was appealed, setting up Wednesday's review.


The case traversed an interesting path, having been one of the two cases that led Attorney General Eric Holder to announce on Feb. 23, 2011, that he and President Obama had determined that Section 3 of DOMA was unconstitutional and
that, accordingly, the administration would no longer be defending DOMA in court challenges. That move left the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, controlled 3-2 by the Republican leadership, to take up that defense.


It was that defense — and the impact of the Obama administration's decision not to defend the law — that was the subject of the first half of today's argument. The latter half, more expectedly, focused on the question of whether
DOMA's marriage definition is constitutional.


As Windsor told BuzzFeed earlier this year, "The idea that I might be a piece of history blows my mind. I think it's kind of wonderful that I'm getting my chance to really ask for justice, and I suspect I'll get it."

Chris Geidner   BuzzFeed Staff

_A pastor at the center of a dramatic and acrimonious custody and kidnapping case has been jailed for refusing to testify in court.

Kenneth Miller, a 47-year-old Mennonite pastor, told U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions on Thursday that he could not answer questions from a grand jury regarding the flight of Lisa Miller and her daughter to Nicaragua to avoid a custody transfer, reports the Associated Press. Lisa Miller (who is not related to Kenneth Miller) took the child overseas in 2009 so she would not have to comply with a court order allowing her former lesbian partner, Janet Jenkins, to see their daughter, reports NBC News.

In August, Kenneth Miller was convicted of helping the mother flee the country. His sentencing begins in March, and he faces a maximum jail time of three years.

The pastor apologized to the court on Thursday and said his "religious beliefs" prevented him from testifying, according to the AP. Miller said that he, and possibly others who may or may not have helped Lisa Miller violate the custody order, were motivated by their conviction in "God's Law," the AP reports.

The reluctant judge replied that while he appreciated the pastor's "faithfulness to your religion and your moral beliefs," the criminal justice system could not function without the grand jury, according to the AP.

The Beachy Amish Mennonites, the Protestant splinter sect that Kenneth Miller belongs to, believes that same-sex marriage is a sin. The group has about 13,000 members worldwide.

The root of the custody dispute and ensuing kidnapping dates back to 2002, when Lisa Miller gave birth to daughter Isabella. At the time, she was still together with her partner Janet, reports NBC News; but the couple was divorced two years later. Some time after that, Miller became a born-again Christian, renounced homosexuality and stopped allowing Jenkins to see Isabella.

The battle between Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins, as well as the trial of Kenneth Miller has snowballed into a widely publicized debate that pits religious conservatives against LGBT advocates. In August, conservative firebrand Bryan Fischer, who has grabbed headlines in the past for inflammatory comments about Newtown and the LGBT community, said Lisa Miller had a responsibility "to obey God rather than man" and kidnap her daughter, reports Right Wing Watch.

Jenkins has also filed a civil suit in which she alleges that Miller, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., and the Lynchburg-based Thomas Road Baptist Church all conspired to help conceal the whereabouts of her daughter. The suit is asking for unspecified monetary damages.

The Huffington Post  |  By Meredith Bennett-Smith Posted: 01/24/2013 7:26 pm EST

LGBTAmish has been contacted by a television producer concerning a new documentary/reality series. We don't know many details but have been told that a series is being worked on and they are looking for former Amish cast members between the ages of 18 and 30. They are very interested in having a LGBT cast member, preferably still closeted. Fair warning: we find the idea of outing yourself  in front of  a nationwide audience a little troublesome.  But, If you fit the bill and are interested send an e-mail to our site and we'll get you in contact with the producer.

NEW YORK — Saying the gay population has "suffered a history of discrimination," a divided federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled Thursday that a federal law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman was unconstitutional, adding fuel to an issue expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court soon.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seemed interested in adding its voice to several other rulings already at the high court's doorstep by issuing its 2-to-1 decision only three weeks after hearing arguments on a lower court judge's findings that the 1996 law was unconstitutional.

In a majority opinion written by Judge Dennis Jacobs, the 2nd Circuit, like a federal appeals court in Boston before it, found no reason the Defense of Marriage Act could be used to deny benefits to married gay couples. It supported a lower court ruling after a woman sued the government in 2010, saying the law required her to pay $363,053 in federal estate tax after her partner of 44 years died.

Jacobs, though, went beyond the Boston court, saying discrimination against gays should be scrutinized by the courts in the same heightened way as discrimination faced by women was in the 1970s. At the time, he noted, they faced widespread discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. The heightened scrutiny, as it is referred to in legal circles, would mean government discrimination against gays would be assumed to be unconstitutional.

"The question is not whether homosexuals have achieved political successes over the years; they clearly have. The question is whether they have the strength to politically protect themselves from wrongful discrimination," said Jacobs, who was appointed to the bench in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush.

He said it was difficult to say whether gays were under-represented in positions of power and authority without knowing their true numbers.

"But it is safe to say that the seemingly small number of acknowledged homosexuals so situated is attributable either to a hostility that excludes them or to a hostility that keeps their sexual preference private – which, for our purposes, amounts to much the same thing," Jacobs said.

Lawyer Paul Clement, who had argued in support of the law on behalf of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the House of Representatives, was traveling and did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, which filed arguments with the appeals court before the ruling, called the decision "yet another example of judicial activism and elite judges imposing their views on the American people."

He urged the Supreme Court to take up the case, saying: "The American people are entitled to a definitive ruling in support of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, as 32 states have determined through popular vote."

Dale Schowengerdt, an attorney with the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alliance Defending Freedom, called the ruling "off base" and predicted the Supreme Court will disagree with it.

James Esseks, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the ruling "a watershed moment in the legal movement for lesbian and gay rights."

"It's fabulous news for same-sex couples in New York and other states," he said.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the decision echoed testimony before his committee that showed the law "has damaging effects on the lives of thousands of American families who are denied the same federal protections as millions of other Americans."

The 2nd Circuit said the law's "classification of same-sex spouses was not substantially related to an important government interest" and thus violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

"It is easy to conclude that homosexuals have suffered a history of discrimination," Jacobs said, noting that for many years in many states, homosexual conduct was criminal and that even the law's supporters acknowledge that gays endured discrimination since at least the 1920s.

He said the law was written so broadly that it touches more than a thousand federal laws. "Homosexuals are not in a position to adequately protect themselves from the discriminatory wishes of the majoritarian public," Jacobs wrote.

He rejected arguments by supporters of the law that it was intended to limit new categories of eligibility for federal funds, promote uniform administration of federal law, protect traditional marriage and encourage responsible procreation.

"Even if preserving tradition were in itself an important goal, DOMA is not a means to achieve it," he said.

Jacobs disputed arguments that same-sex couples have a diminished ability to discharge family roles in procreation and the raising of children, saying the arguments were "inconsistent with actual cases."

And in a footnote, he said that to the extent the law's supporters contend that "Congress' laws might actually influence sexual orientation, there is no evidence to support that claim (and it strikes us as farfetched)."

Judge Chester J. Straub dissented, saying that if the government was to change its understanding of marriage, "I believe it is for the American people to do so."

"Courts should not intervene where there is a robust political debate because doing so poisons the political well, imposing a destructive anti-majoritarian constitutional ruling on a vigorous debate," he said.

The ruling came in a case brought by Edith Windsor. She sued the government in November 2010 because she was told to pay $363,053 in federal estate tax after her partner of 44 years, Thea Spyer, died in 2009. They had married in Canada in 2007.

"This law violated the fundamental American principle of fairness that we all cherish," Windsor said in a statement. "I know Thea would have been so proud to see how far we have come in our fight to be treated with dignity."

The law, which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriages and affirms the right of states to refuse to recognize such marriages, was passed by bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton after it appeared in 1993 that Hawaii might legalize gay marriage. Since then, many states have banned gay marriage but several have approved it, including Massachusetts and New York.

The government defended the federal law until President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in early 2011 directed attorneys to stop doing so. A government lawyer told the 2nd Circuit that the administration reviewed the law and concluded that it deserved a stricter view of what constituted discrimination than the legal reasoning that had previously been applied.

___

Follow Larry Neumeister at http://twitter.com/Lneumeister

James Schwartz was raised in an Amish community in Michigan. In a segment on HuffPost Live, he shared his struggle to fit into this group when he realized he was gay.

"If an Amish youth comes out to his parents and says 'I'm gay', then they really don't have any choice," he said. "They're going to have to leave. Unless they choose, of course, to stay in the closet."

James eventually made the decision to leave his first home. "Going to my first gay club, I sort of felt for the first time that sense of community, and others that were like me," he shared. "They really gave me the courage and strength to decide to live life for me instead of making a lot of other Amish people happy."

Schwartz joined host Nancy Redd to discuss growing up in homophobic communities along with Nate Phelps, LGBT and anti-abuse advocate and son of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps, Bob Pardon, Executive Director of Meadowhaven, a long-term recovery center for survivors of high-control organizations, and Libby Jane, who grew up a member of the Vision Forum/Quiverfull movement.

Watch the full segment on HuffPost Live.