The good news: the New York State Senate had an actual up-and-down floor vote on a controversial and important issue. Bad news: they voted down Gay Marriage. Nice work, everyone.

So much for New York's reputation as one of the most liberal and accepting states in the nation. The State Senate defeated a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage this afternoon after Democrats were unable to convince a single Republican senator to vote for the measure. [NYT]

The American Medical Association—the doctor lobby—has fought health care reform tooth and nail throughout its entire existence. Until like last week! Maybe this explains their change of heart: they are all high on mary jane.

You will soon be hearing a lot about Barack Obama's "Safe Schools Czar." His name is Kevin Jennings, and you will learn that he wants to promote homosexuality, he hates God, and he does drugs.

Oh, hey, you know how Obama's Justice Department keeps filing briefs in support of the Defense of Marriage act equating gay marriage to incest and pedophilia and all that? They don't actually mean it!

Are you a gay Californian looking to get married? You could do it right now! To someone of the opposite sex. But if you want to get gay married, you will have to wait until activists get their shit together.

Last year, a well-funded, well-coordinated campaign to ban gay marriage in California won by a slim margin, partly because opponents forgot to organize and campaign until after the vote. Now they are not going to bother trying again next year.

At a fundraiser yesterday, VP Joe Biden tried, fruitlessly, to appease a gay community enraged by Barack Obama's not caring about their issues all that much. He is "not unaware of the controversy!"

Yesterday, Barack Obama proclaimed "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender Pride Month 2009." Other than that, he has not really done much of anything, at all, for the gays, in his first couple months. Will his new Army Secretary help with that?

Now the gathering storm of Gay Marriage has tsunamied all over Maine. Not Maine! That's where the Bushes live!

The New York Civil Liberties Union is suing the NYPD on behalf of a Queens man who was kicked out of a Yankees game when he tried to go potty during "God Bless America."

Vermont just became the latest domino to fall in the gay-marriage movement, with the state's legislature and senate voting overwhelmingly to override an earlier gubernatorial veto of a bill extending marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Hah, activist judges in Iowa just forced everyone in that state of corn and fiction workshops to get gay married, right away. Does Iowa have gays? Besides a couple of the fiction workshop attendees maybe?

'Tis the season of empty gestures! Inaugural pastor Rick Warren rewrote his website so it no longer says gays are poison to his congregation. In fact a whole long lecture about gays was deleted.

Guess who is not happy with the Rick Warren invocation? Barney Frank, one of the country's three openly gay congresspeople.

Odetta, the awesome blues and folk singer whose work was a soundtrack to the American civil rights movement and an inspiration to Bob Dylan and many others, has died at the age of 77. She began singing in the 1940s, and "In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. anointed her 'The Queen of American folk music.'" Okay? She was also Rosa Parks' favorite singer. Not much more needs to be said, except that her music was off the chain. Three clips come tumbling down like Jericho, below:

Activist judges overturned Florida's 31-year-old law against gay adoption! Fun fact: "Mississippi bans gay couples, but not single gays, from adopting." [AP/Google]

The story we're about to bring you is sad on so many levels. Well, two levels. First, it illustrates the disappointing and kind of disgusting decline of a legendary civil rights institution, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), former home of Martin Luther King, Jr. Second, it shows what a farce half of the things you see on editorial pages are, if they come from public figures. We'll give you a condensed version of this ongoing media vs. advocacy group vs. PR firm controversy-as you read it, ask yourself whether MLK would have found himself caught up in this crap. Charles Steele, Jr., president of the SCLC, wrote an editorial which ran in several southern newspapers. The editorial was against upcoming legislation that would limit credit card fees-a bill favored by retailers (which would save money) but not by credit card companies (which would lose money in fees). Here's the problem: Steele didn't write the editorial. A PR firm working for the credit card companies contracted a third party to write it, and it somehow got submitted to the papers without getting approved by Steele. Fucked up, right? It's obviously a huge mistake by the PR firm. It makes the papers look foolish for running an editorial that the "author" hadn't even seen. And, of course, nobody wants to wake up one day and read something in the paper with their name on it that they've never seen. But Steele and the SCLC aren't heroic in this. Check out their main complaint:

Guys we LOVE our new governor! Thank Roger Stone the abrasive other guy got caught up in that hooker thing because that's really the only way we could've ended up with this awesome black and blind dude who is compulsively honest. AND, it turns out, gay-friendly! He decided the state of the New York would recognize gay marriages performed in California, and he compared the gay rights battle to the African-American civil rights battle, which, as the Times notes, "put him at odds with some black leaders, who bristle at such comparisons." Yes, they do. Why did Governor Paterson do it?

The Brits are rather less enthusiastic about the whole "free speech" concept than the US is. A 15-year-old kid was holding a sign that said "Cult" at one of the Anonymous protests against Scientology in London. The precocious young scalawag had even memorized a 1984 UK court ruling in which a judge called the science fiction-based religion a "cult." But the police gave him a summons and confiscated his dangerous slogan-bearing poster, and now he has to go to court to defend himself.