Map: The State of Marriage Equality in America

Where in the United States do gay people have the right to get hitched?

It’s been a week of wins and losses no matter which side you’re on in the gay-marriage debate.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama finally announced that he supports gay marriage. He emphasized that this is his personal opinion, and that he still thinks states should decide the issue on their own. Despite that caveat, gay rights supporters still had plenty of cause to celebrate. But a day before the president’s historic announcement, voters in North Carolina passed Amendment 1, making it the 30th state with a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Here’s a handy map that shows how far marriage equality has come—and how far it still has to go.


For some perspective, here’s a map Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland made that shows you which states would allow you to marry your cousin:

Cousin Lovin' Map

And for another perspective, here’s another map Mac made. This one shows which states do—and don’t—have laws prohibiting bestiality.

Update: And here’s a map that my colleague Tim Murphy found. It shows you where sodomy is illegal in the US—including the states where it’s illegal only if you’re gay.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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