The cause of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights advanced in several states around the country this week:
* The Idaho Supreme Court will now allow the adoption of a same-sex partner's children, The Washington Post's Eugene Volokh writes: "More broadly, the court concludes that such a second-parent adoption doesn’t require that the parties be married to each other, so that adoption of an opposite-sex partner’s (or even friend’s) children would be allowed as well, so long as the other requirements for adoption are met."
* Nevada has withdrawn its appeal to uphold that state's same-sex marriage ban, Bloomberg reports: "Nevada was defending a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages established by a voter-approved amendment. A federal judge in 2012 ruled that the state law didn’t violate the equal protection rights of eight same-sex couples that sued to overturn it. Yesterday, the state dropped its defense of the ban in the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco" due to the 9th Circuit's ruling that heightened constitutional scrutiny would not allow a gay man to be excluded from a trial involving an AIDS drug.
* Same-sex couples have filed a lawsuit to challenge Texas' same-sex marriage ban, Reuters reports.
* Same-sex couples have filed a lawsuit to challenge Ohio's ban on allowing both same-sex partners on children's birth certificates, the Associated Press reports. A similar Ohio lawsuit over death certificates had success, and the attorney prosecuting the cases says his tactics "will give the U.S. Supreme Court a wider variety of legal arguments to consider when appeals from various states reach their chambers."
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