A spokeswoman for Senate President John Cullerton tells The Associated Press the proposal to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples will get a committee hearing Thursday but there aren't currently enough votes to pass it on the floor.

Spokeswoman Rikeesha Phelon (rih-KEE'-shuh ful-AHN') says she doesn't know how many votes there are for the plan or when it might be called. Some Democrats were not in attendance Thursday. Phelon says no Republicans supported it.

Cullerton's Democrats have 35 seats in the Senate - five more votes than needed for passage.

The Legislature is in lame-duck session until Jan. 9, when the new session is sworn-in.

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In a statement Thursday, NOM said it will form a PAC in Illinois and spend $250,000 to oust any Republicans who support gay marriage. The statement also called on Illinois Republican Chairman Pat Brady to resign "for violating the national GOP platform and urging state Republicans to redefine marriage."

“Any Republican in Illinois who betrays the cause of marriage will be casting a career-ending vote and will be held accountable to their constituents,” Brian Brown, NOM’s president, said in a statement. “We will spend whatever it takes – hundreds of thousands of dollars if necessary – to remove them from office, just as we did three of the four turncoat Republican state Senators in New York who were responsible for gay ‘marriage’ passing there."

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In Rhode Island, the Providence Journal reports, state Rep. Arthur Handy says he will introduce a bill in the General Assembly on Thursday, the first day of the 2013 session.

From the Journal:

Handy has said that the legislation will include, as it has in past versions, language granting religious groups protections, if they object to same sex unions as a matter of their religious beliefs.

Citing the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, a 2011 version of Handy's gay marriage bill stated that every religious institution has "exclusive control over its own religious doctrine, policy, and teachings regarding who may marry within their faith, and on what terms."

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According to reports, around 250 supporters gathered outside Maine City Hall to cheer the first couple to marry under the new law -- Steven Bridges, 42, and Michael Snell, 53. According to the Guardian, "a group in the crowd sang the Beatles song 'All You Need Is Love,' accompanied by several musicians playing brass horns, and many carried signs with such slogans as 'America's new day begins in Maine' and 'Love one another.'"

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Eklof was a part-time minister at a church in Louisville, Ky., in 2004 when the state voted to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Eklof responded by announcing that he wouldn’t perform marriages until same sex couples could wed.

“I had really looked at this as a free speech issue as much as a human rights issue,” he told Salon. It was a violation of the “First Amendment guarantee to religious expression...It would be the equivalent of someone coming into my restaurant and saying you can no longer serve blacks.”

Eklof's stance cost him his job as a video producer for the Kentucky Farm Bureau, a lobby representing and supporting agricultural interests. He sued and the Bureau eventually admitted to firing him for his views. The lawsuit settled for an undisclosed sum, “Enough to make my attorneys and Uncle Sam happy,” Eklof said. (The Kentucky church has continued to follow his example and does not “allow weddings of non-members to be held on its premises until it can open its doors equally to all couples, including gays and lesbians.”)

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What long has been a nonstarter for Republicans -- raising tax rates on wealthy Americans -- is now backed by GOP House Speaker John Boehner in his negotiations with President Barack Obama to avert a potential fiscal crisis. Party luminaries, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, have started calling for a wholesale shift in the GOP's approach to immigration after Hispanic voters shunned Republican candidates. And some Republicans who previously championed gun rights now are opening the door to restrictions following a schoolhouse shooting spree earlier this month.

"Put guns on the table. Also, put video games on the table. Put mental health on the table," Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said last week. Other prominent Republicans echoed him in calling for a sweeping review of how to prevent tragedies like the Newtown, Conn., massacre. Among those who were open to a re-evaluation of the nation's gun policies were Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

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Politico reports:

In June, the House of Representatives told the Supreme Court that the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act “is an issue of great national importance” that urgently requires the justices’ attention. The 1996 law denies federal benefits to same-sex married couples.

But when the court agreed on Friday to hear one of the DOMA cases early next year, the Republican leadership had nothing to say about it.

Advocates on both sides of the issue said they’d seen no statements from Republican lawmakers about the court’s decision to take on DOMA and an even more provocative dispute regarding a ban California voters approved on same-sex marriage.

“I’m personally grateful to Speaker Boehner for being willing to defend the law, but it’s clear GOP elites don’t want to talk about it and want to keep it as quiet as possible,” Maggie Gallagher, a founder of the National Organization for Marriage, said. “That’s so obvious, I don’t see any point in pretending otherwise.”

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Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.

"I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's effective," Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.

Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, "Reading Law," and his lecture at Princeton comes just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Some in the audience who had come to hear Scalia speak about his book applauded but more of those who attended the lecture clapped at freshman Duncan Hosie's question.

"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"

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"There is no question that it is a risk," said Gavin Newsom, California's lieutenant governor, the Daily Intel reports. "If they nationalize it and reject it, that’s going to take decades to come back to the court."

Katherine Franke, director of Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality, told HuffPo's Lila Shapiro that because the lower court's ruling on Proposition 8 was very narrow, she would have preferred if the Court just decided to take up DOMA. "I'm not thrilled. I would have preferred they took the Windsor case alone."

The National Organization for Marriage, on the other hand, thinks things are looking up. “I’m ecstatic,” Brian Brown, NOM's president, told the New York Times. “Taking both cases at the same time exposes the hypocrisy on the other side.”

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Last week, Savage lined up with other gay couples in the state to get their marriage licenses, after the state legalized gay marriage in November.

“It’s really a remarkable journey we’ve been on and such a remarkable sea change,” Savage told Seattlepi.com. “And not just for gay people, but straight people have changed, too. It’s gotten better for us because straight people have gotten better about us.”

Watch:

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30 percent say they support civil unions but not marriages, and 24 percent say neither should be allowed.

One in five said that their views have changed in the past couple of years.

From Politico:

Nearly half, 48 percent, approved of Obama’s handling of the gay marriage issue. Seventy-one percent of Democrats approve, and 65 percent of Republicans disapproved. Independents approved the president’s handling by a 16-percentage-point margin, 50 percent to 34 percent.

The poll surveyed 1000 likely voters over Dec 4-6.

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Proposition 8 is California's ban on gay marriage, which a lower court ruled is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. The Court said it would rule on whether the 14th Amendment bars the state from defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The justices will also decide whether supporters of Prop 8 have standing in this case, and, if not, will not hear arguments on the case.

The Court said it would also take up a DOMA case brought by Edith Windsor, challenging section 3 of the law, which defines marriage as only between a man and a woman for the purpose of receiving federal benefits. The Supreme Court will decide whether or not to uphold the Second Circuit's ruling that the law was unconstitutional because it violated the equal protection guarantee of the 5th Amendment.

Similar to Prop 8, the DOMA order gives the justices a way out of ruling on the merits, because it will decide "whether the Executive Branch’s agreement with the court below that DOMA is unconstitutional deprives this Court of jurisdiction to decide this case; and whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States House of Representatives has Article III standing in this case."

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Macklemore, aka Ben Haggerty, a white Seattle native with a hipster disposition, may not be the most archetypical rapper, but the success of his song speaks for itself. And it comes at a time when hip-hop is undergoing a sea change on how it deals with homosexuality, especially in light of Frank Ocean’s pathbreaking revelation of his own bisexuality this summer.

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King County, the state's biggest county, opened the doors to its auditor's office in Seattle just after midnight PST to start distributing marriage licenses. But hundreds of people had lined up hours earlier, snaking around the downtown Seattle building on a chilly December night.

"We knew it was going to happen, but it's still surreal," said Amanda Dollente, who along with her partner, Kelly Middleton, began standing in line at 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Washington state now joins several other states that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed. Gregoire and Secretary of State Sam Reed certified the election on Wednesday afternoon, as they were joined by couples who plan to wed and community activists who worked on the campaign supporting gay marriage.

Because the state has a three-day waiting period, the earliest that weddings can take place is Sunday. Same-sex couples who previously were married in another state that allows gay marriage, like Massachusetts, will not have to get remarried in Washington state. Their marriages will be valid here as soon as the law takes effect.

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Gay marriage has been legal in the Federal District, Mexico City, since 2010, and the Supreme Court had previously ruled that those marriages must be recognized nationwide. Wednesday’s ruling struck down a law in the southern state of Oaxaca that denied same-sex couples the right to marry there.

The ruling could have repercussions beyond Mexico’s borders. The couples seeking to marry in the Oaxaca case based their claims partly on protections in the American Convention on Human Rights, which has legal force in many Latin American countries. In saying that bans on same-sex marriage are discriminatory, the court may establish a precedent that could be used by LGBT activists throughout the region.

This comes before the U.S. Supreme Court has even decided whether it will hear a gay marriage case.

This Oaxaca case, which has broad implications, had an unlikely beginning. It was initiated by a Oaxacan law student, Alex Alí Méndez Díaz, who brought suits on behalf of a handful of couples even though other LGBT activists in his state warned that they were doomed to fail.

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The court has been considering whether to hear one of several challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, as well as whether or not to hear an appeal of a lower court' s decision that Proposition 8, California's law banning same-sex marriages, is unconstitutional.

The justices initially met to discuss the cases last Friday, but did not release any orders then or Monday morning. Both cases have been added to the official list of cases for consideration for this Friday's closed-door conference.

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