Today’s Lady News: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Speaks Out Against The Stupak Amendment

• In this video clip, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) speaks out against the health care reform bill’s Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which limits how private insurance companies can offer coverage for abortion. More conservatively inclined Democrats voted for the House of Representative’s version of the health care bill this past Saturday night only after the Stupak-Pitts Amendment was included. The video is a little snoozy at first, but 45 seconds in, Sen. Gillibrand gets to the good stuff about why Stupak-Pitts isn’t good for our reproductive rights. [YouTube]
• Speaking of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has said today that the Senate has the 60 votes needed to block the controversial bill when it makes its way to there. Let’s hope so. [Huffington Post]

• Bad news: New York’s State Senate has delayed a vote to legalize same-sex marriage and it is unclear when they’ll take it up again. [New York Times]
• Good news: a D.C. Council committee voted today to send a same-sex marriage bill to the full city council for a vote, where it is expected to pass. [Washington Post]
• Cleveland City Council in Ohio will vote tonight on whether to include transgender people in the city’s anti-discrimination law. [Advocate]
• Anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder confessed in a phone call with the Associated Press that he murdered Dr. George Tiller, a Wichita, Kansas physician who provided late-term abortions. “Because of the fact preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger this was the action I chose…I want to make sure that the focus is, of course, obviously on the preborn children and the necessity to defend them,” Roeder said. [AP]
• The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors’ group, has called for the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy which advises gay and lesbian servicemen to keep their homosexuality a secret. [Fox News]
• Michelle Obama‘s poll numbers have dropped from 72 percent favorability last March to 61 percent favorability in a recent Gallup Poll. [Politico]—What have you got against vegetable gardens, people?
• Arthur Leroy Shoot, a pedophile whom prosecutors called “a sexual psychopath,” received 17 and a half years in prison for attempting to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor overseas. You’d think having been convicted of sexual offenses against children three times, not to mention being called a “sexual psychopath,” would be enough to put someone away for life. [L.A. Times]
• Sandra Guzman, a former editor at the New York Post, who was fired last month, filed a lawsuit in federal accusing the editor, Col Allen, of sexism and racism. [Gawker]
• Lionel McIntyre, a male associate professor at Columbia University, allegedly punched a female colleague in the face at an off-campus bar over the weekend. McIntyre was later arrested for assault and harassment. [Columbia Spectator]
• Pop culture critic Emily Nussbaum analyzed how TV is having “a cougar moment” right now. [New York magazine]

INTERNATIONAL

• After a ten-year legal battle, a lesbian in France has won the right to adopt a child. [BBC]
• The L.A. Times says wives, mothers and daughters of men involved in Mexico’s narcotics trade are more frequently being used as drug traffickers because they supposedly pass thorough police checkpoints more easily. [L.A. Times]