After more than four hours of debate, the Minnesota State Senate passed a bill that will make their state the 12th in the US to make gay marriage legal.

The bill passed by a margin of 37-30.

Minnesota is the first state legislature in the Midwest to pass marriage equality as gay marriages became legal in Iowa through the courts. Governor Mark Dayton will sign the bill into law on the steps of the capitol on Tuesday (14 May).

As the Colombian Senate prepares its second attempt to vote on marriage equality bill shortly today, we speak to Green Party senator John Sudarsky, an ardent supporter of LGBT rights in Colombia.

Last week Colombia’s Senate decided to postpone the debate on same sex marriage until today (23 April).

However most commentators are pessimistic, after an agreement was allegedly reached between Colombia’s two largest parties, the Conservative and the ‘U’, to not allow the bill to become law.

Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said this morning that she will introduce a bill that will allow international same-sex marriages to be legally recognized in Australia.

An anti-gay senator has said the Ireland constitutional convention voting in favor of marriage equality was ‘flawed’.

Rónán Mullen, an independent politician, has said senators were made to feel bad if they did not take the ‘politically correct’ position.

The 100 convention members casted their historic votes on 14 April in Dublin with 79 voting in favor of marriage equality.

US Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah says he believes civil unions - not same-sex marriages - are the answer to the marriage equality debate.

'I do believe this could be solved greatly by a civil-union law that would give gay people the same rights as married people,' Hatch said in an interview with radio station KVNU in Utah. 'I think we can solve this problem without undermining the very basis of marital law in our country.'

Support for marriage equality has grown across all 50 US states over the past eight years, a new report has found.

Published by the UCLA's Williams Institute, 'Public Support for Marriage for Same-Sex Couples by State', it found with an average increase of 13.6%. 

Olympia Snowe, the ex-Senator of Maine, stated yesterday (5 April) she now supports marriage equality.

'I think obviously this has evolved over time on the whole issue for the whole country and the nation,' she said to CNN, as reported by the newspaper the Portland Press Herald. 'We've seen a sea change in society's whole attitude on this particular issue and it's only natural for government to be responsive to those changes.'

Bob Casey, US senator from Pennsylvania, came out in favor of marriage equality on Monday (1 April) and also called for the end of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Casey had been under increasing pressure after four of his Democratic colleagues in the senate switched their positions last week when the US Supreme Court heard cases challenging DOMA and California's Proposition 8.

Will & Grace ended its run in 2006, but the sitcom about a gay man and his straight female best friend is still be very much in the current conversation about gay marriage.

Gay marriage foe Rick Santorum, the former US senator who ran for the Republican presidential nomination last year, discussed the show's impact on gay marriage during the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month.

His father has been one of the most outspoken critics of gay marriage in New York politics but Ruben Diaz Jr. on Wednesday (27 March) showed that he is his own man in the issue.

The younger Diaz, who is president of the Bronx borough in New York City, said in a blog post that he came to the decision after 'considerable deliberation and introspection.'

The son of Rob Portman is defending his father against critics who wonder why the Ohio Republican Senator waited two years after learning his son was gay to publicly support gay marriage.

'Part of the reason for that is that it took time for him to think through the issue more deeply after the impetus of my coming out. But another factor was my reluctance to make my personal life public,' Will Portman writes in a guest column for the Yale Daily News.