Between 20 and 40 activists have been arrested at Slavic Pride in Moscow by anti-riot police, early reports indicate.
According to a statement released by Pride organiser Nikolai Alekseev, violence was used to break up the peaceful march, which had been banned by Moscow authorities.
It was held to coincide with the Eurovision final which will be hosted by the city tonight. Attempts to hold a Pride march in previous years have been met with violence.
Among those arrested were British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, and Chicago campaigner Andy Thayer.
The Iowa Supreme Court this morning upheld a Polk County judge’s 2007 ruling that marriage should not be limited to one man and one woman.
The ruling, viewed nationally and at home as a victory for the gay rights movement and a setback for social conservatives, means Iowa’s 5,800 gay couples can legally marry in Iowa beginning April 24.
There are no residency rules for marriage in Iowa, so the rule would apply to any couple who wanted to travel to Iowa.
Today’s decision makes Iowa the first Midwestern state, and the third [CD: fourth if you include California] in the country, to allow same-sex marriages. Lambda Legal, a gay rights group, financed the court battle and represented six couples who challenged Iowa’s 10-year-old ban on gay marriage.
Supreme Court Justice Mark Cady, who wrote the unanimous decision, at one point invoked the court’s first-ever decision, in 1839, which struck down slavery laws 17 years before the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of a slave owner to treat a person as property.
Iowa’s gay marriage ban “is unconstitutional, because the county has been unable to identify a constitutionally adequate justification for excluding plaintiffs from the institution of civil marriage,” Cady wrote in the 69-page opinion that seemed to dismiss the concept of civil unions as an option for gay couples.
“A new distinction based on sexual orientation would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our constitution,” Cady wrote.
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