GOP Maryland Delegate Wade Kach (R) delivered an emotional address explaining his evolution towards supporting marriage equality, just moments before the state House passed legislation extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians. Kach had voted down the bill as recently as Monday night, in a committee vote, and had co-sponsored a measure to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

But tonight, Kach attributed his change of heart to his “pro-life” roots, explaining that he changed his mind after hearing testimony from gay and lesbian families, and realizing that their children deserved the same legal protections as the kids of opposite-sex parents:

KACH: I’m a pro-life legislator and as a pro-life legislator, I believe that it is my responsibility to make certain that children are taken care of. This child — if this couple were to be able to have a civil marriage would be taken care of. This child would have the rights that a child of a traditional married couple would have. So, I left that hearing a changed person….I thought to myself I’m sent here to represent my constituents. I’m sent here because my constituents have faith in my judgment. However, my constituents did not send me here to judge people. So I am casting a green vote for this bill and I’m hoping all of you that especially care about children will think of them and hopefully we are going to as a state all of our children are going to have the same rights so that they can prosper in this state.

Listen:

The Baltimore Sun reported last night that former Vice President Dick Cheney — a long-time supporter of marriage equality — personally lobbied Kach on the issue.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has issued a conditional veto of a bill extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians in the state, the Associated Press reports. “I have been just as adamant that same-sex couples in a civil union deserve the very same rights and benefits enjoyed by married couples – as well as the strict enforcement of those rights and benefits,” Christie said in his statement. “To that end, I include in my conditional veto the creation of a strong Ombudsman for Civil Unions to carry on New Jersey’s strong tradition of tolerance and fairness. The Ombudsman will be charged with increasing awareness of the law regarding civil unions, will provide a clear point of contact for those who have questions or concerns and will be required to report any evidence of the law being violated.”

The legislature now has two years or until January 2014 to try and override his veto. On Thursday, the Assembly passed the bill in a vote of 42-33, falling 12 votes short shy of a two-thirds majority. The Senate was three votes short in its vote on Monday.

Democrats would have to vote to approve Christie’s offer of an Ombudsman and Assembly Majority Louis Greenwald has released the following statement: “Thousands and thousands of New Jersey families are denied financial security, health security and fundamental equal rights every day because of a failed civil union experiment. And yet in spite of their second-class citizenship, the governor single-handedly – -through the stroke of his pen – seeks to codify discrimination against them…He has just violated his own oath of office. And in the end, he will answer to every New Jersey citizen for his actions.”

The Obama administration has announced that it will not defend laws that prevent married same-sex couples from obtaining military benefits. In a letter to Congress today, Attorney General Eric Holder argued, “[t]he legislative record of these provisions contains no rationale for providing veterans’ benefits to opposite-sex couples of veterans but not to legally married same-sex spouses of veterans … Neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of Veterans Affairs identified any justifications for that distinction that would warrant treating these provisions differently from Section 3 of DOMA.”

Currently, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prevents federal agencies from recognizing same-sex relationships and Title 38 of the United States Code defines spouses as a person of the opposite sex. Holder added that Congress would “be provided a ‘full and fair opportunity’ to defend the statues in the McLaughlin v. Panetta case if they wished to do so.”

That lawsuit, filed by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network in October on behalf of Maj. Shannon McLaughlin of the Massachusetts National Guard, argues that McLaughlin and her partner Casey are denied benefits that similarly situated opposite-sex couples enjoy, including, “medical and dental benefits, basic housing allowances, travel and transportation allowances, family separation benefits, military ID cards, visitation rights in military hospitals, survivor benefit plans, and the right to be buried together in military cemeteries.” Such treatment “violates constitutional equal protection guarantees,” “the Tenth Amendment and constitutional principles of federalism,” it says.

“Given the military’s ‘zero tolerance’ for discrimination based on sexual orientation, it is unconscionable that DOMA forces the military to engage in the very discrimination that it prohibits its service members from engaging in through its ‘zero tolerance’ policy,” the suit claims.

Since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Defense Department has been engaging in “a careful and deliberate review of the possibility of extending eligibility for benefits, when legally permitted, to other individuals including same-sex partners.”

Obama previously announced that he would stop defending the constitutionality of DOMA on February 23, 2011 and has similarly permitted Republicans in Congress to take up that fight.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked about the progress of same-sex marriage in the states during President Obama’s visit to Washington State this morning. Gov. Chris Gregoire (D-WA) signed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage on Monday and has urged New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R) to enact the marriage equality bill that passed in his legislature yesterday.

Carney reiterated the administration’s position that “the states should be able to decide this issue,” but did not say if Obama’s support for the marriage rights of gays and lesbians was still “evolving”:

Q: Since we’re going to Washington, Washington State legalized same-sex marriage this month. And as you know, Governor Christie is promising to veto a bill legalizing same-sex marriage that passed the New Jersey assembly. I’m just wondering what does the President think about Washington State’s decision and then Governor Christie’s vow to veto legislation?

MR. CARNEY: Well, I would say only broadly, as I have said in the past, without weighing into individual states and their actions, that this President strongly supports the notion that the states should be able to decide this issue, and he opposes actions that take away rights that have been established by those states. But I’m not going to comment specifically on individual states.

Q: Is his view on same-sex marriage, though, still evolving? Or how would you describe it?

MR. CARNEY: I have no update for you on that.

Meanwhile, pressure is growing for Obama to come out in favor of same-sex marriage. On Tuesday, Valentines Day, the ACLU invited LGBT advocates to urge Obama to endorse marriage equality, noting that he has been evolving on the question for more than 470 days. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has also called for marriage equality to be included in the party’s 2012 platform.

The Canadian government sparked a fire storm earlier this year when it announced — through a legal brief filed in the case of a same-sex couple seeking a divorce — that foreign couples wed in Canada couldn’t be considered legally married because their marriages were not recognized in their domestic jurisdictions. The Harper government “moved quickly to quell the controversy, promising it had no intention of revisiting the debate on the definition of marriage” and today introduced legislation to address the problem:

The bill, called an act to amend the Civil Marriage Act, says it establishes a “new divorce process that allows a Canadian court to grant a divorce to non-resident spouses who reside in a state where a divorce cannot be granted to them because that state does not recognize the validity of their marriage.”

The amendments would allow a court in the province where the marriage was performed to grant a divorce if there has been a breakdown of the marriage as “established by the spouses having lived separate and apart” for at least one year before a divorce is requested. The divorce would only be granted if neither spouse lives in Canada at the time the divorce is requested, by one, or both individuals.

A local news report on the change:

There are approximately 1.6 million to 2.8 million homeless young people in the United States and a disproportionate number — 20 to 40 percent — are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. LGBT youth often run away from home because of family conflict and then “face overt discrimination when seeking alternative housing, which is compounded by institutionalized discrimination in federally funded programs.”

Last night, a local CBS affiliate in Miami, Florida offered an in-depth look into the crisis of LGBT youth homelessness and the children who are put out “like trash” by parents who refuse to accept them:

Studies show that 320,000 to 400,000 gay and transgender youth face homelessness each year and that many lose their homes at the young age of 13 or 14, as they come out to their parents. Fortunately, the Department of Health and Human Services is already providing “training and technical assistance to States and Indian Tribes on a wide variety of LGBTQ-related issues” and the Obama administration has released recommendations for providing the best possible care in shelters for homeless LGBT youth.

But still, more must be done. There are currently no federal programs specifically designed to meet the needs of gay and transgender homeless youth and federal grant awards for homeless youth services “are being awarded to providers without mandating that they not discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity. As the Center for American Progress has recommended, President Obama should issue an executive order “recognizing both lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender homeless youth and homeless youth in general as special-needs populations, and protecting them from discrimination by federal grantees” and the federal government must begin developing programs “that help families from all communities support and nurture their gay and transgender children.”

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) has also introduced the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act, a bill “designed to help homeless youth rejoin their families and escape life on the streets.” The measure calls for a “demonstration project for improving family relationships and reducing homelessness for LGBT youth” and the development of programs “that improve family relationships and reduce homelessness for LGBT youth.”

Mothers of gays and lesbians in St Petersburg, Russia have allegedly written a letter urging lawmakers to reject an anti-gay bill banning the “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism” to minors. Under the proposed legislation, “promoting homosexuality will be punishable by fines ranging from 5,000 rubles ($168) for individuals to 500,000 rubles ($16,800) for legal entities.”

In the letter, the mothers claim that gay and lesbian Russians face significant stigma and that “[m]any of them end up on the verge of suicide, because there is no one they can talk to about their feelings.” “Children must be enlightened, not scared. Homophobia is laughable in the 21st century,” the mothers write. “Russia’s task is to destroy homophobia and help children and their parents who face this situation.” But Russian leaders are dismissing the correspondance as a “fake” and claiming that the mothers are not setting “a good example for real mothers”:

“There have been several of these letters,” Vitaly Milonov, deputy of St. Petersburg’s legislative assembly, told RT. “I suppose all of them were written by the same person. And I don’t think these were mothers. And I do not even think this to be a good example for real mothers – those who face this, I can even say, tragedy. The author of these letters says that we are offending the gay community. I do not care about offending the gay community. No one cares; they present no danger to the society. We just try to protect kids from gay lifestyle propaganda.”

Watch an RT segment on the letter:

The world community — including the United States, Australia, and the Members of the European Parliament — have condemned the bill, which has passed two of three readings. St Petersburg would join three other cities in Russia with a law that makes it an offence to promote “sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgender” to children.