WASHINGTON — The State Department will offer equal benefits and protections to same-sex partners of American diplomats, according to an internal memorandum Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent last week to an association of gay and lesbian Foreign Service officers.

Mrs. Clinton said the policy change addressed an inequity in the treatment of domestic partners and would help the State Department recruit diplomats, since many international employers already offered such benefits.

“Like all families, our Foreign Service families come in different configurations; all are part of the common fabric of our post communities abroad,” Mrs. Clinton said in the memorandum, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by a member of the gay and lesbian association.

“At bottom,” she said, “the department will provide these benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex partners because it is the right thing to do.”

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BOSTON — Maine could be the next New England state to embrace same-sex marriage after the State Senate voted Thursday to legalize the practice.

The Democratic-controlled Senate voted 21 to 14 for a bill that would allow gay couples to marry starting later this year. The measure appears to have even broader support in the House of Representatives, which will take it up on Tuesday.

Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat, used to oppose same-sex marriage. But since the bill was introduced in January, he has said he is keeping an open mind.

Read more >> Maine Senate Backs Same-Sex Marriage – NYTimes.com.

CONCORD, N.H. — The New Hampshire Senate voted narrowly on Wednesday to legalize same-sex marriage, paving the way for the state to potentiallybecome the fifth in the nation — and the third this month — to allow gay couples to wed.

The Democratic-controlled Senate voted 13 to 11 in favor of the bill, but only after a last-minute amendment strengthened language granting legal protections for religious groups and organizations that do not want to perform or otherwise help carry out same-sex marriages.

Read more >> N.H. Senate Passes Gay Marriage Bill – NYTimes.com.

From the New York Times: 

ELDON, Iowa — As of Monday, gay couples will be allowed to marry in places like this small town that once served as the background for Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” the painter’s famous depiction of stern, traditional Midwesterners.

Many people, even some who live here, cannot mesh their plain-Jane image of Iowa, a state that sits so sturdily in the middle, with the front lines of thesame-sex marriage debate.

“To be honest, I would rather not have it in Iowa,” said Shirley Cox, who has spent most of her 84 years in this old railroad town. Ms. Cox said she had always been proud to tell people what state she was from, but now was not so sure.

“But the thing is,” she went on, “it’s really none of my business. Who am I to tell someone how to live? I live the way I want, and they should live the way they want. I’m surely not going to stomp and raise heck and campaign against it.”

Read more >> Same-Sex Ruling Belies the Staid Image of Iowa – NYTimes.com.

In response to nearly two days of angry online commentary, particularly onTwitter, Amazon.com said on Monday that “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” had caused thousands of books on its site to lose their sales rankings and become harder to find in searches.

Most of the company’s online critics complained that the problem appeared to have a disproportionate effect on gay and lesbian themed books, leading to cries of censorship.

Read more >> Amazon Rights Error After Tweet-Rage on Twitter – NYTimes.com.

IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.

In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)

On their wedding day, somehow, my parents made it out of Nebraska without getting arrested again, and were wed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on March 1, 1958. This was five years before Nebraska would strike down its laws against interracial marriage, and almost a decade before the Supreme Court would outlaw miscegenation laws throughout the country in Loving v. Virginia.

Read More >> Op-Ed Contributor – Iowa’s Family Values – NYTimes.com.