Washington state Rep. Jim Moeller (D-Vancouver), who is openly gay, announced the upcoming legislation Thursday, reports The Columbian

From the Columbian:

Washington has one of the most sweeping domestic partnership laws in the nation. But gay marriage legislation has failed to pass repeatedly, most recently in the 2011 session, when a bill Moeller co-sponsored with state Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, failed to come to a vote. Moeller and Murray are among the Legislature’s openly gay members.

Moeller said he’s optimistic that the 2012 bill will make it into law.

“Our objective is to strengthen the social and legal protections for average, mainstream Washington families — the men, women and their children who make their homes in our communities and neighborhoods,” he said.

He emphasized that the legislation will protect the rights of clergy and religious institutions to determine for whom to perform marriage ceremonies and which marriages to recognize.

Washington’s 1998 Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as between a man and a woman. It survived a legal challenge when the Washington Supreme Court upheld it in 2006.

But times have changed, and support for gay marriage is growing nationwide, Moeller said. “Four years ago, there were only a couple of states that actually offered marriage equality. Now there are six.”

Thursday marked another noteworthy day for same-sex marriage supporters, as the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which would allow all legally-married couples to access federal benefits.

The audience, mostly teachers representing states from all over the U.S., listened on as leading education reformers like Linda Darling-Hammond, former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and professor Diane Ravitch and film star Matt Damon condemned the high-stakes testing they say are inimical to public education.

Teachers, students, and education reformers await a keynote speaker during the July 30 Save Our Schools March (Mikhail Zinshteyn)

Slam poets and union leaders told protesters to overwhelm the inboxes and landlines of policy makers; country music performers sang tongue-in-cheek tunes like “Test Teacher,” with many in attendance singing along to the lyrics: “Work on Math and English and forget about the rest,” and “get off the monkey bars and stay behind a desk.”

Another performer, George Mason professor Mary Stone Hanley, likened NCLB to snake oil while reciting her poem, “The Mess,” saying the maligned and decades-old education policy is “a simple answer to a complex question.”

George Mason professor Mary Stone Hanley shares her poem as a sign linguist translates during the July 30 Save Our Schools March

Policy specifics

Diane Ravitch, in an interview with The American Independent before she came on stage, said, “[policy makers] don’t understand what good education looks like. These congressmen went to great schools; if they want the same for today’s students they need to get rid of punitive testing.”

Under NCLB, schools that persistently underperform must allow students to enroll in other programs within the district, taking valuable state and federal funding that rides with every pupil. The penalties continue to snowball until downright school closure or charter-school takeover is prescribed. Other consequences include hiring a private company to take over operations or placing the school under direct state control.

Recently many districts have adopted value-added metrics, a set of data collected that link student standardized test performance to teacher quality, in evaluating teachers. Value-added approaches have been shown to be highly volatile and statistically unpredictable.

NCLB, the current iteration of the longstanding Early and Secondary Education Act passed under President Lyndon B. Johnon, uses a federal measure called Annual Yearly Progress to determine the progress of a school; U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters in June over 80 percent of schools are slated to fail according to AYP next year. Under NCLB, by 2014, nearly every school in the country is expected to have 100 percent of its students proficient according to state-administered tests used to fulfill NCLB regulations.

At the heart of the grievances voiced by groups like Save Our Schools is the diluting of traditional forms of education in favor of a one-size-fits-all legislative makeover they contend has not improved student proficiency in core subjects, nor have they led to increased graduation rates.

Recently, that rebuke gained new credibility with a May report from the National Academies of Science that concluded [PDF] “[i]ncentives will often lead people to find ways to increase measured performance that do not also improve the desired outcomes. As a result, different performance measures—that are not being used in the incentive system—should be used when evaluating how the incentives are working.”

On standardized exit exams for graduates, the report found these “high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement. The best available estimate suggests a decrease of 2 percentage points when averaged over the population.”

Consequences of the system

“Data is meaningless by itself without context,” Ravitch told TAI, explaining socio-economic conditions often dwarf the impact a teacher can have on a student. “Testing is good for collecting information to help students, not punishing them and their teachers.”

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education who mentors new teachers at Lesley University (and the mother of Matt Damon), told TAI her principal policy prescription would be to eschew applying “business standards on human value.” Lawmakers are making policies that are harmful to students, she said, and erode community control of schools.

In New Orleans, for example, charter schools operate chiefly under a type of self-contained school regulatory code that critics argue has undermined parental involvement in student affairs. Since Hurricane Katrina, only a handful of schools in New Orleans are neighborhood schools, meaning students are forced to attend classrooms miles away from their homes.

In a brief exchange with Matt Damon, he told TAI high-stakes testing and the attendant punishment applied to teachers of under-performing students is narrowing the curriculum for children and educators. “You wouldn’t allow business people to design military policy — why do we allow them to shape our education policy?” Damon asked.

Matt Damon speaks to reporters during the Save Our Schools rally (Mikhail Zinshteyn)

An increasing amount of school organizations including the National Education Association — the nation’s largest teacher union — have called out the coziness superintendents in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, as well as senior officials in the U.S. Department of Education, have with billionaire-affiliated foundations like the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation.

Union Input

Many local and regional union bodies attended the rally, their ranks made up chiefly of teachers and education specialists who have watched governors in Indiana and Wisconsin strip portions of their collective bargaining rights.

During a series of crowd interviews, Melissa Patterson, a Milwaukee school teacher of special education students ranging from the third- and fifth-grade level, told TAI she joined the march because “schools are falling apart, and the teachers are being blamed.” She pointed the finger at “politicians with no classroom experience” passing high-stakes testing legislation onto students. “We need adequate funding, and we have to kill Race to the Top,” Patterson said.

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, a labor group operating in the nation’s capital that experienced a series of setbacks under former Chancellor of D.C. Schools Michelle Rhee, told TAI increased community involvement and a pared-down reliance on test results in evaluating teachers and students would be at the front of his policy wish-list.

Mary Cathryn Ricker, an educator and local union president in St. Paul, Minnesota, balked at the notion parents and teachers wrangle for unrealistic spending promises from state and federal legislators.

“We need to change the discussion: move away from what we think schools need to what students need,” she said. “We need more teachers, students, and parents in the decision process [with lawmakers]; we should make a list of experiences we believe students should have, agree on those, and learn the cost,” she proposed.

The Student Program Chair of NEA, Tommie Leaders, also insisted more community involvement is necessary in education reform. He helps coordinate the labor group’s commitment to the 70,000 student teachers enrolled in traditional teacher colleges across the country.

“We have 50 states with separate and different education policies; a one-size-fits-all approach to the solution is not the policy prescription,” he said.

Next Steps

The traditional ally of teachers, the Democratic Party, and President Obama have turned from its base, said New York University Professor Pedro Noguera to the crowd. “When you lose your base, you lose your vote,” he cautioned.

Cathryn-Ricker believes a number of Democratic public representatives “stopped asking the teachers what the classrooms are like.” She says the Save Our Schools series of events, held on Thursday, Friday and at Saturday’s rally, is a launching pad for more action, telling TAI a return to addressing community-oriented education policy is key.

Throughout the event the subject of poverty was raised as the chief adversary of student learning. Melissa Patterson, the teacher from Milwaukee, told TAI she taught in the suburbs of Chicago as well, “and the support those students have financially makes a big difference.”

“I didn’t change the way I teach,” she added, “but the performance of those students and the ones I teach in Milwaukee was obviously different.”

Tomorrow, the Save Our School committee members will gather at American University to draft a new platform and determine what the group’s next steps should be. Bob Schaeffer, a test accountability specialist and one of the main organizers of the four-day event said the meeting would be closed to the media.

“When Bill Gates opens up his executive committee meetings [on education],” Schaeffer told TAI, “we’ll open up ours as well.”

The Department’s spokesperson said that although Vargas retains the license card, if he is pulled over while driving, authorities will be able to verify that he has an invalid license.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that in fiscal year 2010, a record 393,000 people were deported from the United States, a number made possible by the “huge increases in deportations of people after they were arrested for breaking traffic or immigration laws or driving drunk.” AP found that 13,028 people were deported for traffic violations unrelated to inebriation:

Marshall Fitz, immigration policy director at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, said some of the people being counted as criminals have committed traffic violations that would usually draw a traffic ticket. But when the driver can’t produce a valid license, the officer pursues questions about immigration status.

Illegal immigrants caught in traffic stops often are pressured into signing an agreement to leave the United States and to pay a fine or somehow acknowledge responsibility for the traffic offense and thereby end up in the statistics as criminals even though they never went to court, Fitz said.

ICE removal numbers (PDF) released to the public suggest that last year’s high rate of deportation will continue in 2011. And although ICE has suggested that they will not be deliberately pursuing Vargas’ deportation, he now runs an increased risk of being detained if he should have an encounter with law enforcement.

Blogger Emi Kolawole attempts to describe what will happen by answering reader questions. At least a couple of his answers are sure to play badly in GOP conservative stalwart Doug Lamborn’s defense-industry-dependent and Tea Party friendly Colorado Springs district, for example :

“A shutdown would also affect pay for members of the military, said senior government officials familiar with the planning. If the current funding expires on Friday, in the middle of the military’s two-week pay period, the Defense Department would distribute paychecks [only] for the first week…”

And this one:

“Veterans of previous shutdowns are reminding [government] contractors that they could be locked out of their offices or forced to cut short any government-funded travel. During a shutdown, experts suggest contracting firms should ask employees to complete overdue training programs, take vacations or temporarily reassign them to other projects. Worst case, some firms may need to furlough employees. Boehner on Friday said any shutdown could interrupt contracts and force the government to pay more in eventual overtime costs.”

Given the nearly apocalyptic deficit and anti-government rhetoric that fueled the Tea Party movement over the last two years, the prospect of a government shut down has been looming for a lot longer than the last month. The “shut ‘er down” rhetoric of today was discernible in the “throw-the-socialists-out” rhetoric of the anti-health care reform battle of 2009 and the election campaigns that ended in November 2010. Republican candidates and officeholders who fueled or at least benefited from that rhetoric can’t now turn their back on the narrow positions that rhetoric carved out for them in office. The shut down is coming. It came with the Tea Party to Capitol Hill in January.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The daily quotes from the report demonstrating how D.C.’s efforts to combat AIDS have slowed for the first time since 2005, while nonprofit DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice says the city has been doing poorly at illness-data tracking and managing grants to AIDS-aid groups. Last month PreventionWorks!, the district’s largest supplier of clean needles for more than 12 years, closed down, due to delays in city funds, dwindling private donations and a high turnover rate of managers, according to the Post.

A closing statement from the DC Appleseed board of directors said:

“Washington, DC has the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country with an estimated 1 in 20 residents living with HIV. The CDC estimates that injection drug use has directly and indirectly accounted for more than one-third of AIDS cases in the United States. Over the past decade, PreventionWorks! has evolved from a needle exchange organization into a critical part of the District of Columbia’s HIV prevention strategy.”

According to the Post, DC Appleseed blames former Mayor Adrian M. Fenty for dropping the ball toward the end of his term and tasks Mayor Vincent C. Gray with resuming the fight against AIDS. The mayor is scheduled to hold a news conference today before the 27-member commission on HIV/AIDS-prevention he appointed two weeks ago, of which he is also the chair.

Politifact started with President Obama.

“We will not be adding more to the national debt,” President Obama said, after he released his budget for fiscal year 2012, starting in October.”

We looked at the numbers, though, and found that the debt continues to grow because of interest on the debt service. The White House didn’t count the interest in their estimates. We rated his statement False.

“The federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs,” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) said, referring to growth in the last two years.

We rated this False, because it counts temporary Census workers as new federal jobs. Those Census jobs are temporary and go away when the once-a-decade Census is over.

“We can save $125 billion in simply not giving out money to Medicare recipients that don’t exist for procedures that didn’t happen,” from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif).

We looked into that number, though, and found the total also included improper payments for programs including Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Social Security and the school lunch program. Medicare is the government agency with the largest chunk of improper payments, but it’s still less than half the total. We rated his statement False.

PolitiFact confirmed other statements:

“The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy,” from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).

We found that the United States’ total debt at the start of the year was $14 trillion. We also found that the size of the U.S. economy, measured by the gross domestic product, or the value of all goods and services, was about $14.745 trillion last year. After discussing the nuances of the data and different ways to look at the public debt, we concluded Ryan’s statement was True.

“One of the biggest causes of our soaring debt and economic insecurity ends up being Pentagon spending. The budget for the Pentagon consumes more than half of our discretionary spending,” from Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).

Our partners at PolitiFact Ohio rated that True, keeping in mind that total discretionary spending includes both domestic and international spending.

“Eliminating earmarks does not reduce spending,” from Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.).

Ending earmarks would stop pet projects for lawmakers, but it wouldn’t directly reduce overall spending. We rated Lugar’s statement Mostly True.

According to the Washington Post, federal agencies are preparing, individually, to operate at reduced levels in the event of a government shutdown, which the Obama administration has said it is trying to avoid. Exactly which departments would be closed and which federal workers would be sent home has not been revealed.

But when a government “shuts down,” it doesn’t actually shut down completely — just those those services that are not considered to be “essential,” such as tours at the National Mall or getting rid of the animal poop at the National Zoo (which actually happened during the last government shutdowns in 1995 and early 1996, the Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe told Fox 5 Morning News).

Watch O’Keefe’s analysis of the situation on Fox 5 Morning News:

Temporary Spending Bill Needed To Avoid A Government Shutdown: MyFoxDC.com

“Essential” services, according to the Office of Management and Budget, are defined as those that are “essential to the national security or the safety of life and property”; provide for benefit payments and the performance of contract obligations; and provide essential activities that protect life and property, such as medical and emergency care, public health and safety, air traffic control, border surveillance, law enforcement and protection of federal prisons.

Per a Congressional Research Service report from November 1999, the five-day federal shutdown in November 2005 resulted in the furlough of about 800,000 federal employees. The 21-day shutdown from December to January 1996 resulted in approximately 284,000 furloughs, while another 475,000 federal employees continued to work “in a non-pay status,” meaning their federal health benefits continued.

Other consequences of the’05 shutdown, according to the report:

• New patients were not accepted into clinical research at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, and hotline calls concerning disease were not answered.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ceased disease surveillance.
• Toxic waste clean-up work ceased at 609 sites.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms experienced delays processing alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives applications.
• Work on more than 3,500 bankruptcy cases was suspended.
• Delinquent child-support cases were suspended.
• 368 National Park Service sites were closed.
• 200,000 U.S. applications for passports went unprocessed, as did 20,000-30,000 applications by foreigners for visas every day.
• All 13,500 Department of Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs employees were furloughed.
• An estimated 25,000 American Indians did not receive timely payments of oil and gas royalties.

But the mail was delivered.

According to CNN Money.com, this time around, if the government shuts down, we could see hundreds of thousands of federal employees being furloughed, during which time they will not be paid, but should expect a retroactive payback sometime later, unlike federal contract workers. CNN Money points out that the longer the shutdown lasts, the more difficult it becomes for agencies to determine which workers are still essential.

Congress has stated its plans to discuss a short-term spending plan to prevent a shutdown. On Tuesday, Senate Democrats proposed to extend current stimulus-level appropriations for at least a month, meaning a suspension of President Obama’s additional proposed spending increases for the time being, according to FoxNews.com. Republican leaders are working on a counter-proposal that could be released today. According to the network, aides have suggested the counter-proposal will likely call for a short-term plan of two to three weeks, with pro-rated cuts from their original $61 billion cut proposal.

House Republicans posit that Democrats really want a shutdown, as a way of making the Republicans look weak and avoiding budget cuts. And in a statement released today, House Speaker John Boehner said:

“The American people want Congress and President Obama to enact legislation that keeps the government running while cutting spending.  Heeding their will, the People’s House has passed such legislation; the Democratic-controlled Senate, by contrast, has not.  Americans understand we need to stop the spending binge in Washington to create a better environment for job creation.  So I ask Senator Reid, with all due respect: what are you willing to cut?

Instead of huddling with lobbyists to stop spending cuts, the Republican-led House has listened to the people and passed legislation to keep the government open through September while cutting spending.  If the Senate refuses to vote on this bill, the House next week will pass a shorter-term bill to keep the government open that also cuts spending.  We will give Senator Reid and his colleagues every opportunity to follow the will of the people we serve. Our goal is to cut spending to create a better environment for job creation – not to shut down the government.”

While the measure could pave the way for greater accessibility to contraception to women, many questions remain to be answered, particularly how such contraceptives would be regulated. The legislation would have to undergo intense scrutiny from the city’s pharmacy and medical boards that would have to draft regulations and reconcile the fact that hormonal birth control is not one-size-fits all, like other over-the-counter drugs.

In other words, it’s going to be a while.

The bill was introduced by At-Large Councilman David Catania on Tuesday. Catania has previously worked as chairman to the council’s Health Committee and made efforts to increase access to health care and contraception to low-income residents.

As The Washington Examiner reported, officials have questioned the need for over-the-counter access to contraception. K. Edward Shanbacker, Medical Society of the District of Columbia’s executive vice president, suggested that if birth control were available without a doctor’s prescription, women might forgo annual exams.

But ultimately, Catania acknowledged he is simply introducing the conversation to council, allowing the medicine and pharmacy boards to collaborate on this issue. His legislation does not set age restrictions but leaves decision up to the boards as part of the rule-making process.

Judy Waxman, vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center, said her primary concern is on cost.

“On one hand it would provide easier accessibility,” Waxman said. “Women could just go in and take it off the shelf like cough medicine. But is it going to be covered by insurance?”

She pointed out that in D.C., women whose incomes fall 300 percent above the federal poverty line qualify for low-cost contraception under Medicaid. Raising the cost of birth control would actually make it less accessible to low-income women, she noted.

There have been recent pilot programs in Seattle and Portland, Ore., to test programs that would improve accessibility to contraception.

In Oregon, Planned Parenthood of Columbia/Willamette operated an “instant birth control” program allowing patients to apply online to receive the contraceptive pills after* consulting with doctors or nurses over the phone, but the program was phased out last year.

According to the Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality, the program served as an impetus for women to begin receiving regular women’s health examinations and screenings, but it was not successful in targeting low-income women, because the service was not covered by Medicaid.

Seattle instituted a pilot program from 2003-2005, allowing approximately two dozen pharmacists to dispense hormonal contraception to about 200 women, but the pilot did not develop into a permanent program.

Update, 5:05 p.m.: Kirsten Moore, president and CEO of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, says in a statement to TAI:

“While the model of pharmacist-provided contraception can work well, key components, like appropriate training, patient education, and continued coverage of hormonal birth control under Medicaid and private insurance are critical to ensure the safety and success of this program.

“We know that over 90,000 women in DC need contraception, and we are pleased to see local policymakers look for new ways to expand access. There is no reason a woman should have to jump through medically unnecessary hoops just to get her birth control pills.”

*We previously incorrectly stated patients received contraceptive pills before consulting with doctors or nurses.

The initiative is a move to ask Americans to help local law enforcement by keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious activity,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and NBA Commissioner David Stern told press at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. The emphasis toward civilian “suspicious activity reporting” has surged in recent years, but advertising campaigns and high-profile partnerships have really begun to take off.

In December, DHS joined forces with Wal-Mart, launching the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign initially in 230 Wal-Mart stores, with a target of 588 sites in 27 states. A short video plays at select checkout stations, telling shoppers to call local police if they see something suspicious. (The term “suspicious,” by the way, is rarely elaborated on or defined by DHS in campaign messages.)

Moving on to sports, DHS partnered with the NFL with its campaign at the Super Bowl in Dallas early this month. And now the NBA.

“We hope that this partnership will emphasize basically that security is a shared responsibility,” said NBA Commissioner David Stern at yesterday’s press event. “We think that sports is a terrific way to send messages, and to get people who go to events to focus on this very important message.”

Or maybe Napolitano is just a big sports fan.

“Our partnership with the NBA to bring the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign to professional basketball events throughout the nation is a vital part of our efforts to ensure the safety of players, employees and fans,” she told the press.

Inquiries have begun over how effective these campaigns are at protecting the country from terrorism. With sports fans and budget-conscious shoppers reporting “suspicious” activities every 10 minutes, does that help the security agencies or overwhelm the system?

David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst for the Cato Institute, said he thinks the national security agencies are overwhelmed with information.

“While there is value in getting a person on the street to be aware and report suspicious activities, you can also create too many false positives,” Rittgers said.

Rittgers said the Federal Bureau of Investigations receives about 700 messages a day, and the National Counterterrorism Center receives about 10,000 pieces of information daily. Clogging the system with even more reports of indiscriminate “suspicious activities” won’t necessarily bring these agencies closer to the information they need to prevent terrorist plots.

“People talk about connecting dots,” he said. “But it’s knowing which dots to connect that has value. …. The commitment to simply collect all the dots might not be as useful as a lot of people would propose.”

For example: “It’s not illegal to purchase a ski mask, it’s not illegal to purchase a gun, it’s not illegal to sit outside a bank. But it’s when you put those all together.”

The measure of success is still to be seen, but meanwhile the money is flowing.

“If You See Something, Say Something” are now being posted all over the country, according the DHS: on 9,000 federal buildings nationwide, at the Mall Of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the general aviation industry.

DHS allocated $2.9 million for the campaign in 2009, but an official told CNSNews.com that the agency has only spent $500,000 on the campaign to date, saying it is focusing its efforts on partnerships –- outsourcing security, if you will. And while Napolitano told the network the campaign has resulted in the launch of several investigations, she said it’s still difficult to measure whether it will effectively deter would-be terrorists.

Presently, the Washington Post reports that the resolution has 24 supporters in the Senate, and if those 24 maintain their commitment to passing the bill, it will have just enough votes for passage; there are 47 state senators in Maryland. Should that happen, the Democrat-controlled House of Delegates is expected to pass the bill, and Gov. Martin O’Malley has already promised to sign it into law if it makes it to his desk. If SB 116 passes, Maryland will become the sixth state (and seventh jurisdiction overall, including D.C.) in which same-sex marriage is legal.

A similar bill has been drafted in Washington state and has quickly been gathering co-sponsors. It is currently in the Washington House Judiciary Committee, although it shares a slate with a competing bill that would amend the Washington constitution to define marriage as being between a man and woman.

Indeed, not all progress in legislatures across the country is toward legalizing marriage rights for all citizens. Of the five states in which same-sex marriage is currently legal, two are considering rolling back the law and instituting same-sex marriage bans. Iowa’s House of Representatives passed a resolution at the end of January that would allow the public to vote on banning same-sex marriage. Though Democrats outnumber Republicans in the Iowa Senate 26 to 24, Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal is concerned enough about the bill’s chances that he hopes to block a Senate vote on the resolution altogether. Iowa’s House and Senate would have to approve the measure in two consecutive General Assemblies — which are two years apiece — before it could be put to referendum.

Meanwhile, Republican legislators in New Hampshire have proposed three separate bills that would repeal the state’s same sex marriage law. The House Judiciary Committee will hold public hearings this week to determine whether any of the bills will be put to the floor for a vote. Although Republicans in the state netted massive wins in the November elections, public opinion polls show that a majority of New Hampshirites oppose the repeal of same-sex marriage.

The battleground over same-sex marriage of course does not end with those states. The Indiana House on Tuesday passed a ban on gay marriage, an action that appears redundant at first glance, as Indiana already made gay marriage illegal in 2005. However, the new bill extends not only to marriage, but would insert language into Indiana’s constitution to deny legal rights to anything “substantially similar” to marriage. Constitutional amendments in Indiana must be voted on in two separate legislative sessions and then approved in a public vote.

Bridging the gap between outright bans and marriage rights for all are the civil unions bills currently being debated in several legislatures across the country. Although supporters are struggling to pass civil unions bills in Colorado and Rhode Island, a Hawaii bill approving civil unions has passed a House vote and, following a one-day delay, is scheduled for a final vote in the Senate today. The Senate overwhelmingly passed an earlier version of the bill, and Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) has pledged to sign it into law.

Correction: This article originally reported that to overrule a constitutional amendment in Iowa, the legislature must approve a measure two consecutive years before it could be put to referendum. Actually, the legislature must approve of a measure two consecutive General Assembly sessions, which are two years each. The story has been amended.