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With all eyes on the national repeal of DOMA, we may have overlooked the inequity in our own state. But just last week, State Senator Heather Steans proposed the Equal Marriage Act to the state senate. This is the first bill to be introduced in the Illinois senate, but it meshes well with the current Same-Sex Marriage and Religion Freedoms Act by Representative Greg Harris in the state House.

Even though it has long been proven that gay men are not the only carriers of HIV, only making up about half the newly infected rate in the U.S., no one CC’ed blood donation centers. A Canadian man recently filed a countersuit against Canadian Blood Services who were suing him for not revealing his status as MSM when donating between 1998 and 2002. MSM are one of the few major groups, and the only one based on sexual practice, to be denied as blood donors based simply on the demerit of having homoerotic intercourse since the arbitrary date of 1977 (because no one could possibly have had AIDS before then). Kyle Freeman’s lawsuit asserts that all applicants should be reviewed based on their behavior and not their identity and is another example in a long list of people fighting to change this near-universal policy.

On Thursday, October 1, a Texas judge ruled that the state ban on same-sex marriage violated the equal protection clause in the state constitution when deciding in a case of same-sex divorce. The attorney general filed an accelerated appeal, but the court will go ahead and file the divorce papers in the meantime. Speculation is high as to whether or not this will mean a trend toward marriage equality in the state or if this is an isolated instance.