Maryland, the state some DCists call home, may be getting closer to becoming the next state to legalize same-sex marriages. Well, one step closer, anyway. A case filed by nine same-sex couples earlier this month (plaintiffs Jodi Kelber-Kaye and Stacey Kargman-Kaye are pictured above) and aimed at overturning a state law banning same-sex marriage is currently working its way through the courts, with a circuit court in Baltimore set to hear oral arguments on July…

It just goes to show, you really never can tell who your sharing a neighborhood with. No sooner did we get settled in the suburbs of Maryland, than we learned we’d been sharing our former neighborhood (or at least part of it) with an alleged purveyor of child pornography. Fortunately, we were already sitting down when we heard news that a D.C. man from our old stomping grounds was arrested recently for using his computer…

A Maryland gay man’s legal battle to keep his family together, is taking another step forward. According to 356Gay.com, Maryland’s Court of Appeals will hear Hedberg’s appeal to retain custody of his son and continue living with his partner, after overturning a lower court court ruling dismissing Hedberg’s complaint aganist a Virginia court ruling requiring his partner, Blaise Delahoussaye, to move out of the family’s home. A Montgomery County judge dimissed the complaint without giving…

Via Boing Boing this morning comes news that Digital Rights Management may be sending dollars down the drain in Fairfax. Tax dollars, that is. According to a report from Phil Shapiro of the Digital Divide Network, the Fairfax Public Library system got the great idea to distribute downloadable books. There’s just one problem. The books are in Windows Media Format. That means they don’t play on Macs, iPods or computers running the GNU/Linux operating system….

Gay and lesbian families scored a rare victory in Virginia last week, when the state’s Supreme Court ruled — in a 5-2 decision — that the state must provide new birth certificates for children born in Virginia and adopted by gay and lesbian couples outside the state. The case was brought by three gay couples who were denied birth certificates for their adopted children. The key here is that the new birth certificates will be…

A family battle that started in Virginia has wound its way to Maryland, where gay father Ulf Hedberg of Rockville asked the state’s second highest court, according to the Sun, to disolve a court order requiring his partner to move out of their home in order for Hedberg to retain custody of his son from a previous marriage. The original order was issued in Virginia, that most gay-friendly of states, where the couple lived…

With the Schiavo saga still fresh in everyone’s memory, gay and lesbian couples in Maryland came a bit closer to legally being allowed to make medical decisions for one another when the state House of Delegates passed the Medical Decision Making Act of 2005. The legislation would allow same sex and opposite sex couples, who register with the state as domestic partners, to make medical decisions for each other, visit their partners’ hospital rooms, share…

We were a bit taken aback to learn that former D.C. public schools official Kifah Jayyousi was recently arrested for alleged ties to terrorists. According to MSNBC, Jayyousi is accused of being a follower of radical Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (pictured) and charged with “providing material support to terrorist groups and conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure people or damage property in a foreign country.” NBC 4 reports that Jayyousi served as chief facilities officer…

We picked up this little tidbit via Laura Rozen’s blog, War and Piece. It seems that folks in a diplomat-heavy neighborhood in Upper Northwest are less than pleased that one of the chief architects — one Paul Wolfowitz — of the Iraq war is staging a very different sort of “invasion and occupation” in their neck o’ the woods, as the Post mentioned this past week. The reason? A not-so-secret romance with Arab feminist and…

When crunching the numbers on the war in Iraq, what it all adds up to pretty much depends on who’s doing the math. In this case, we’ll provide the numbers, and leave the you to figure out how it all adds up. The tally in Clarendon, the one this DCist passes by almost every day, now reads a total of 1,520 U.S. casualties in Iraq. It’s just a little off the online total, which is…