Last night rumours were circulating that the government was about to make a big announcement on same sex marriage. This morning I noticed a tweet from @EvanHD:

Observing from abroad, slightly surprised at how unexcited Twitter is at the impending announcement of gay marriage coming to the UK

The first thing that comes to mind is because, actually, this is not an announcement about a step forward in same sex marriage... this is an announcement about a consultation in six months time.

This is the main part of my letter to my MP about the riots and the political response. There have been some amazing blog posts written about these incident (see lower down) and I wish I had the style and intelligence they show but in the mean time, I can offer this:

Well, I'm writing back to my MP with just a brief paragraph as below.

A few weeks ago, those crazy folks over at the Equality and Human Rights Commission - the uber body created by the Equality Act to oversee all different branches of equality and Human Rights - issued a press release advising they wished to intervene in four cases (well, four cases, joined into two for deliberation) before the European Court of Human Rights.

Without doing anything that is or should be illegal, the EDL managed to completely fuck up my night.

I had just moved further to the back of the crowd at Warrington Music Festival to try and escape the smoking (when are we going to ban that, really!) and Bill Davro was starting his set when I suddenly noticed, in front of me, four people with black tops on and a red cross with "English Defence League - Widnes Division".

For those that don't know, the EDL is a political front for violent fascist thugs.

So, we lost the AV referrendum. I say "we" as if I played a big part in pushing the #Yes2AV message - I didn't. AV is a poor compromise on electoral reform that I struggled to get excited over and I didn't want my negativity detracting from the campaign because however small a step it would be, it would still have been a good step. First Past the (imaginary, flexible) Post is a spectacularly bad system and we do deserve better, but AV maintains many of the same flaws and doesn't actually meet some of the criteria it claims to.

News is going round today about the lifting of the ban on gay men giving blood. This seems to be adding more flesh to a story from March. However, you don't have to get very far into this story at all to realise it's full of the same crap we already have.

So, Pink Paper reports that Ben Summerskill has opened his mouth and firmly inserted his foot again. Well, this time it's all there in black and white in his March eBulletin. Titled "Tick Amy Lamé's Box!" on the web version of the email, it includes the following P.S. to his introductory comment:

On the day that the Government launched a Charter on tackling homophobia and transphobia in sport, the government also released the followup to their June 2010 Working for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equality" document detailing specific action steps and advances in policy.

After sitting through Sunday's speculation of what could be in the then upcoming government announcement on "gay marriage" I was fairly certain that it was going to be about how religious premises would be able to start offering civil partnerships and was hopeful of the announcement/launch of a consultation on actual equality on this issue.