The laws, designed to keep sexually explicit material out of the hands of minors and to keep minors from being exposed to sexual references, contained legal wording that the judges said: “criminalizes fiction no more tawdry than a romance novel.”
The statutes also had the potential to put parents, educators, librarians and booksellers at risk for jail time for peddling such dangerous works as young adult books by Judy Blume, or even selling books about practicing safe sex.
The lawsuit was brought by Powell’s Books, other booksellers, librarians, publishers and sex-education professionals. Thankfully, sanity triumphed in the courts on this one.
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The ever-daring actor James Franco told MTV that he is unimpressed with the sex scenes from Breaking Dawn, saying, “It was kind of a letdown after all that buildup.” After reading and watching every installment of Stephanie Meyer’s neutered vampire series Twilight, he compares a tent scene between Meyer’s three romantic interests to a scene from everybody’s favorite gay cowboy flick.
“The movies are almost commenting on themselves. There will be a scene where the go-to guys, Taylor and Rob, are in the tent, it’s almost like a Brokeback Mountain scene, where the two guys are talking in a tent and the girl is asleep, and they’re having, like, this romantic moment almost through her, in a way. One of them says, ‘Well, I’m hotter than you,’ and it’s almost like they’re winking at the fans, like to Team Jacob or Team Edward.”
Franco has also recently starred in the movie Howl about Allen Ginsburg’s revolutionary erotic poem, and he’s professed that he prefers playing gay characters, so he might be slightly biased—but surely everyone can agree that Breaking Dawn would be far more intriguing if the two male leads made out just a little.
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Same-sex couples in New York still can’t be legally married, but a new law grants them the right to jointly adopt children. The wording of the state’s previous adoption legistation has been changed from “husband and wife” to “married couple.” The new law also allows unmarried partners to adopt. The right to adopt children often goes overlooked in the fight to win marriage equality, but it's still there, and the fact that New York has taken this step is quite an encouraging one.