On January 24th, an anti-women’s rights and anti-gay march will take place in San Francisco. The Bay Area Coalition for Reproduction Rights (BACORR) is calling on human rights supporters to protest the so-called “Walk for Life” led by religious conservatives.

The “Unite to Fight the Right Wing” counter-protest will begin with a rally at San Francisco’s Music Concourse at Embarcadero and Market Streets at 10:30am. More Details

As part of this year’s protest, BACORR is also calling attention to the ICE raids against immigrant communities. Anita O’Shea, BACORR spokesperson writes “The ‘Walk for Life’ is part of a multi-pronged rightwing movement that includes bigots in suits as well as armed, vigilante Minutemen, clinic bombers, and gay bashers…..We must stop the blame game against women, immigrants and queers before the ultra-right gains momentum.”

In recent years the Catholic Church has helped push through two discriminatory acts, the “Conscience Rule” and Proposition 8. The “Conscience Rule” allows health care providers to refuse to fill a birth control prescription for “moral” reasons. BACORR co-chair Gemma Mirkinson responded to the institution of the Conscience Rule asking, “What’s next: refusing service to people with AIDS, or immigrants or transgender folks? This is nothing but bigotry sanctioned by the highest office of the land and applauded by the people who will trek through our city January 24.”  See Anti-Women and Anti-Gay “Walk for Life” will March Through San …
Bay Area Indymedia, CA 

 SAN FRANCISCO — They’re calling it Stonewall 2.0.

Outraged by California voters’ ban on same-sex marriage, a new wave of advocates, shaken out of a generational apathy, have pushed to the forefront of the gay rights movement, using freshly minted grass-roots groups and embracing not only new technologies but also old-school methods like sit-ins and sickouts.

Matt Palazzolo, 23, a self-described “video artist-actor turned gay activist,” founded one group, Equal Roots Coalition, with a group of friends about 10 days ago. “I’d been focused on other things in my life,” Mr. Palazzolo said. “Then Nov. 4 happened, and it woke me up.”

Often young and politically inexperienced, the new campaigners include an unlikely set of leaders, among them a San Francisco chess teacher, a search-engine marketer from Seattle and a former contestant on “American Gladiators,” who jokingly suggested that he had become involved in the movement as a way of making up for his poor performance on the show.

“We’re a gay couple in West Hollywood, neither of us involved in activism, but we just wanted to help,” said Sean Hetherington, 30, a stand-up comic who was the first openly gay contestant ever to do battle, however briefly, in the Gladiator Arena. “And we were amazed at what happened.”

Mr. Hetherington and his companion were among several people surprised by the strength of positive reaction after starting Web sites geared toward a demonstration planned for Wednesday, “Day Without a Gay.” Its organizers are asking gay rights supporters to avoid going to work by “calling in gay” and volunteering in the movement instead.

Many grass-roots leaders say the emergence of new faces, and acceptance of tactics that are more confrontational, amount to an implicit rejection of the measured approach of established gay rights groups, a course that, some gay men and lesbians maintain, allowed passage of the ban, Proposition 8.

  See Gay Marriage Ban Inspires New Wave of Activists
New York Times, United States

Gay rights supporters scored another major victory in court Tuesday, when a state judge in Miami tossed out a statute that had for more than 30 years barred gay people in Florida from adopting children. The decision came after a week packed full of dueling expert testimony over whether any evidence supports the state’s contention that children are put at risk when raised by gay parents. The answer, said Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy S. Lederman, is not at all: “The Department’s position is that homosexuality is immoral. Yet, homosexuals may be lawful foster parents in Florida and care for our most fragile children who have been abused, neglected and abandoned. As such, the exclusion forbidding homosexuals to adopt children does not further the public morality interest it seeks to combat.”

Yet, despite the good news for gays contained in the ruling, the decision is hardly the last word on the issue. The state has vowed to appeal, and the issue is likely to end up before the Florida Supreme Court, which upheld the ban once before in 1995. On the federal level, the U.S. Supreme Court has already let stand lower court rulings that upheld Florida’s law, the nation’s strictest ban on gay adoption. (See a video on the backlash against gay marriage in Florida.)

Meanwhile, conservative activists across the country are working hard to make sure that no court, at any level, has the final word on gay adoption. Like gay marriage before it, conservatives are looking at the issue of who can raise children as one best decided at the ballot box, not in the courthouse. Those efforts received a boost on election day in Arkansas, where voters easily passed a law that restricts any unmarried couple living together from adopting children. Arkansas joined Florida, Nebraska, Utah and Mississippi as the only states with laws that either directly or indirectly ban adoption by gays.

  See The Fight Over Gay Adoption Heats Up
TIME 

ES MOINES — The Iowa Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday in a pivotal same-sex marriage case that could echo throughout the nation and be far more difficult to challenge at the ballot box than a high-profile ruling in California, legal experts say.

The lawsuit, filed by six same-sex Iowa couples, pits gay rights supporters against those who argue that gay marriage threatens traditional family values.

The case, Varnum v. Brien, could make Iowa the first state in the Midwest to legalize gay marriage, says University of Iowa law professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig. Other high-court decisions favorable to gay rights advocates have come from traditionally liberal, coastal states: California, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The hearing comes little more than a month after California voters approved Proposition 8, a measure that limited marriage to a man and woman in the state constitution.

 See Iowa high court to hear gay-marriage case
USA Today