SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- In the wake of two landmark Supreme Court decisions that arguably advanced the cause of gay rights in the United States, conservative factions wasted no time in retaliating. But according to data analyzed this weekend by the National Security Agency (NSA), a record-breaking majority of Americans expressed support for the rights of GLBT couples to wed.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Wednesday's ruling against Section 3 of DOMA by the Supreme Court left long-suffering members of the GLBT community jubilant and hopeful, but devastated religious conservatives who are opposed to promoting the rights of people they view as sexually immoral. Former Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has been one of the most newsworthy anti-gay politicians over the past decade. In 2003, he famously warned that relaxing the legal definition of marriage would open the floodgates to all manner of deviant behavior, including "man on dog" relations. Today, in protest of the Supreme Court's ruling and to illustrate the very dangers implicit in the decision, Rick Santorum announced that he will marry a dog.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a watershed ruling on Wednesday by recognizing same-sex marriage in states where it has been legalized, striking down Section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which restricts the definition of wedlock as between a man and a woman for the purposes of receiving federal benefits. But anti-gay conservatives derided the ruling as a "dangerous precedent set by activist judges that will cripple the economy and immigration reform." Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, blasted the decision. Legalizing gay marriage, he declared, discriminates against people who are opposed to it. In that same vein, he also cried foul on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 for overturning segregationist Jim Crow Laws. Scalia deemed those decisions equivalently abhorrent because they discriminate against racists who don't wants blacks treated as equal citizens.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- It comes as no surprise that conservative politicians continue to denounce the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. It comes as no surprise that these same congresspeople fight tirelessly to find ways of overturning the ruling. So Rep. Michael Burgess' (R-Texas) declaration that the Supreme Court should dissolve the 23- to 24-week abortion window it legalized in 1973 also seems par for the course. What stunned the nation this week was Burgess' reasoning -- that fetuses masturbate as early as 15 weeks into pregnancy and therefore feel pleasure. This also means they feel pain, he contends, which is the basis for his argument to ban abortions much earlier than the prevailing laws allow. Clearly, Burgess is seeking to rally support from religious conservatives who have made ending abortion their foremost political and moral cause. But like abortion, masturbation is also a sin.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Obama administration have spent the last 11 days wiping egg from their faces after a federal contractor, Edward Snowden, brought to light a series of covert data mining operations orchestrated by the U.S. government against everyday Americans, without their knowledge or consent. Because the NSA targeted telecommunications and Internet service providers, which contractually assure users that their private communications are protected under the service agreements, the outrage has been widespread. But despite the backlash over these intrusive and legally questionable violations, the NSA has made a conciliatory gesture by offering its vast repository of personal intelligence as a free cloud storage and emergency backup service, competing directly with companies such as Google and Dropbox.