Cultivated Compendium

The Roanoke Times has this profile on Timothy Bostic and Tony London, who are suing to challenge Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage. They told the newspaper they decided to challenge the ban because they want to get married in the state in which they live: "When other states began changing their marriage laws, London and Bostic briefly considered getting married out of state. 'We did discuss it, but why would we go to Iowa to get married and come home and not be married?' Bostic said," The Roanoke Times further reported.

Their lawyers attorneys Theodore Olson and David Boies, who successfully litigated California’s Proposition 8 case.

The New York Times' Adam Liptak writes that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide tomorrow if it will hear a lower court decision that mandating a corporation provide contraceptive coverage for its employees violates freedom of religion.

President Obama's administration is still reeling from the failure to have the federal health-insurance exchange up and running for consumers to shop for health insurance (ahead of the deadline for when the insurance mandate kicks in). There could be further repurcussions if the Internal Revenue Service is not ready to enforce the requirement that all Americans secure health insurance, The Washington Post reports.

The issues include, The Post reports, that: "Besides lacking coverage information that would help the agency enforce the 'individual mandate,' the IRS also is hamstrung in penalizing those who do not sign up. The lawmakers who drafted the health-care law intentionally barred the IRS from using its customary tools for collecting penalties — liens, foreclosures and criminal prosecution. The only means of collecting the fine is to essentially garnish tax refunds for people who overpaid their taxes."

IC Magazine asks if the Maori, or the indigenous people of New Zealand, could have their traditional knowledge and cultural customs copyrighted by multinational corporations under a trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Parntership. A draft of the TPP was released by Wikileaks.

The government of New Zealand "clearly opposes the 'informed consent or approval and involvement of the indigenous or local community holding such knowledge', before user rights (and later on copyright and trademark rights) are given to TPP members and their corresponding investors (multinational corporations)," according to IC Magazine.

The New York Times reports that the most recent United Nations talks on climate change made some progress: "Delegates agreed to the broad outlines of a proposed system for pledging emissions cuts and gave their support for a new treaty mechanism to tackle the human cost of rising seas, floods, stronger storms and other expected effects of global warming." However, while these climate-change negotiations weren't a Copenhagen fiasco, "treaty members remain far from any serious, concerted action to cut emissions. And developing nations complained that promises of financial help remain unmet," The Times also reports.

In 2009, the Montana Supreme Court rejected a civil liberties lawsuit seeking full marital rights for same-sex couples as too broad and without enough specificity on discrimination laws, the Billings Gazette reports. Now the ACLU has filed a lawsuit which "cites specific statutes that prevent gay couples from receiving equal rights and protections medically, financially and over crucial end-of-life decisions," the Billings Gazette also reports.

A lawsuit in Texas is challenging that state's ban on same-sex marriage, according to Lez Get Real. Along with the many other lawsuits in the country challenging state-level Defense of Marriage Acts or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, the couples in this lawsuit also argue that their equal-protection and due-process rights are being violated by being barred from matrimony.

Both Brazil and German, which have been the subjct of American surveillance, are seeking to "apply the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to online communications," Foreign Policy reports. The United States, however, is pushing back, "to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that 'extraterritorial surveillance' and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights," Foreign Policy further reports.

Separately, Reuters reports that a "draft U.N. resolution that some diplomats said suggested spying in foreign countries could be a human rights violation has been weakened to appease the United States, Britain and others ahead of a vote by a U.N. committee next week." The initial draft would have had the General Assembly declare it is "'deeply concerned at human rights violations and abuses that may result from the conduct of any surveillance of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance of communications,"' but the draft now proposes the General Assembly declare it is '"deeply concerned at the negative impact that surveillance and/or interception of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance and/or interception of communications, as well as the collection of personal data, in particular when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights,'" according to Reuters.

The West Virginia Attorney General is seeking to intervene in a federal lawsuit challenging West Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage in order to defend the constitutionality of the state law, The Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia, reports. The plaintiffs allege that their constitutional rights to equal protection and due process are being violated by the ban.

The Consumer Financial Protection  Bureau has filed a brief in a federal court siding with  "Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s top financial regulator, against a lawsuit from two western Native American tribes," The Daily Caller reported. The tribes sued over cease-and-desist letters sent by Lawsky over the online payday loan businesses. Lawsky contend that the interest rates charged by the businesses for their loans are too high, while the tribes argue that they are sovereign entities and they follow federal law, The Daily Caller further reported.