It’s nice to have so many allies from around the country coming out in support of the effort to defeat Amendment One. One such partner is Democracy for America (DFA), a nationwide grassroots PAC with one million members strong. DFA’s chair, Jim Dean, gave a interview to Pam on why DFA is opposing Amendment One.

The deluge of videos opposing Amendment One is quite astonishing — ones produced by the official campaign, and equally impressive are passionate and heartfelt ones done by those outside of the campaign. In just the last day or so, we have had more political figures step up to say why this amendment is wrong for North Carolina.

In what may be a landmark decision, the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, charged with enforcing statutes banning sex (and other) discrimination in employment has ruled that the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also applies to sexual orientation. The case involved a transgender woman.

Having grown up in the 1960′s and 1970′s, I always assumed that when the South lost the Civil War, that unfortunate matter was pretty much settled. After all, slavery had ended, and while de facto segregation and and racist disenfranchisement were proving to be stubbornly difficult to eradicate, a steady progression of court cases and civil rights laws seemed to mean that such peculiar institutions existed less and less de jure.

Angela Corey, the special prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin case, announced Tuesday she will make her decision on whether to charge George Zimmerman within 72 hours — by Friday. And given recent events, her decision has become tougher, especially if she leans against prosecution.

At the start of the first hearing on a lawsuit challenging the Homeland Battlefield Act, a federal judge appeared to be “extremely skeptical” that those pursuing the challenge had grounds to sue the US government. However, by the end of the hearing, the judge acknowledged plaintiffs had made some strong arguments on why there was reason to be concerned about the Act, which passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year’s Eve last year.

The Justice Department and the FBI, responding to a growing display of outrage, will open an investigation into the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17 year-old African-American killed in a gated community in Sanford, Florida by a neighborhood watch captain. This follows a month of protests over the shooting and the failure of local authorities to arrest the shooter.

Just a couple of days after “Sergeant Massacre” left his base in southern Afghanistan and singlehandedly perpetrated the My Lai of the Afghan War, shooting and evidently in some cases stabbing to death 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, a district police chief in Kapisa Province reported that a NATO air strike had killed three civilians and injured two more. Mistaken for insurgents, two shopkeepers had, he claimed, died on the spot, as had an elderly man later. A NATO spokesman responded that the dead were, in fact, insurgents, though “additional information” on those deaths was being collected.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to accept a case challenging a lower court ruling on the anti-discrimination policy at organizations recognized by California state universities. The groups relied on a “religious freedom” argument to justify discriminating against LGBT students — restricting admittance to Christian members only by a fraternity and sorority at San Diego State University, but the appellate court disagreed.

Emiel Cleaver, son of Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, reveals an important part of Kansas City’s–and our nation’s–history in his film Freedom is Now: A Documentary, which tells the story of Freedom, Inc., the groundbreaking political organization which empowered the city’s black community for both social and political change.