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SD public defense duties shift from counties to state; SCOTUS appears skeptical of restricting government communications with social media companies; Trump lawyers say he can't make bond; new scholarships aim to connect class of 2024 to high-demand jobs.

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The SCOTUS weighs government influence on social media, and who groups like the NRA can do business with. Biden signs an executive order to advance women's health research and the White House tells Israel it's responsible for the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

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Midwest regenerative farmers are rethinking chicken production, Medicare Advantage is squeezing the finances of rural hospitals and California's extreme swing from floods to drought has some thinking it's time to turn rural farm parcels into floodplains.

Same-Sex Marriage: One Year Later

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Thursday, June 30, 2016   

INDIANAPOLIS – There are a lot of first wedding anniversaries being celebrated in the next few weeks by couples who raced to the altar after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage across the nation.

Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of that decision.

Evan Wolfson, former president of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, says many of those couples thought they'd never be able to make their union legal, but since the court's decision, more than a million people have gotten married.

He says most Americans embrace them.

"Public opinion polls that we've seen, including Gallup a few weeks ago, show that the public continues to support the freedom to marry, and for the first time ever we had the majority of support for people over 65," he points out.

Wolfson says winning the right to marriage is just the tip of the iceberg. He says work still needs to be done to secure equality for everyone, and to make sure no one is discriminated against whether it's at the workplace, in housing, in a restaurant or in a bathroom.

Wolfson says the hard work that secured the freedom to marry needs to continue.

"Let it be the gift that keeps on giving,” he urges. “The power of the marriage vocabulary are really powerful ways of changing hearts and minds, and we need to keep doing that, and then harnessing that empathy, that growing support to the remaining legal work that's still ahead."

Wolfson says the focus now needs to be on anti-discrimination laws.

"We need to have a federal civil rights law,” he stresses. “There is no federal civil rights law yet that expressly prohibits discrimination on sexual orientation or gender-identity grounds, and we need to see those laws as building blocks, or as gains in their own right at every level."





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