Iowa
*Iowa City held a Pride parade on Saturday. The Press Citizen set the scene:

Wind gusts and stormy clouds did not deter well over 2,000 people from packing downtown for the Iowa City Pride Parade Saturday.
Even though it had been raining only 20 minutes before, the parade went off without a hitch at noon. With a mixture of American flags and rainbow flags wafting over spectators’ heads, the parade to celebrate the LGBT community brought spectators from near and far.
“They don’t have any pride parade like this in Burlington, or anywhere around there,” Dean Hesselink of Burlington said as he sat on a bench on East Washington Street.

Iowa City’s Pride festivities are the oldest in Iowa and one of the oldest in the country. The Daily Iowan took a look at the history of the event:

Iowa City’s Pride Week festival, founded a mere year after the Stonewall riots, is one of America’s oldest pride festivals. This week’s celebration stands on that historical legacy and on our state’s reputation for social progression — but it will also be a great time to get out and have some fun downtown.
“We’ve got our biggest lineup ever this year,” said Jason Zeman, the Pride executive and also the owner of Iowa City’s only gay club, Studio 13, 13 S. Linn St. “It’s our [IC Pride’s] 45th year and our first year as a nonprofit. We have more sponsors than we’ve ever had. We have bands downtown; we have local drag kings and queens, a yoga class, belly dancers, and a lot more.”

The Press Citizen reports that Iowa City Pride had an increased police presence this year due to increased community relations with the LGBT community:

An increased police presence is expected this weekend at the Iowa City Pride celebration, but it is not because event organizers expect trouble.
For the first time in the event’s 45-year history, a representative from the Iowa City Police Department will be available to answer questions about ICPD’s role as liaisons for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual community. Jewell Amos, who has served as chair of Iowa City Pride since 2011, said ICPD actually approached her to form this partnership.
“They set it up and we were totally on-board with it,” she said. “It will be a fun thing for the kids and will also break down walls. The police sometimes get a bad rap and they don’t always deserve that.”

*On the other side of the state, Council Bluffs hosted the 2015 Heartland Pride Parade, the Daily Nonpareil reports:

Supporters of LGBT residents of western Iowa and Nebraska will line downtown Council Bluffs on Saturday morning for the 2015 Heartland Pride Parade.
Parade entries will begin traversing the route at 10 a.m. at the intersection of Ninth Avenue and South Main Street. They then will follow a path toward Broadway on Pearl Street before heading back toward Ninth Avenue on South Main Street.
Council Bluffs Police Sgt. Jason Bailey said the route is the same as the Celebrate CB parade except the route curves around the fountain near Broadway instead of closing the street. Road closures will begin at 8:30 a.m., he said, and the parade should be finished by 11 a.m.
The parade is part of Heartland Pride’s celebration that continues in Omaha at Stinson Park in Aksarben Village with a festival running from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tickets to the event are $10, although the parade is free.

*Presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz was in Iowa last week where he took a swipe at the LGBT community because a business that engaged in discrimination closed after a lawsuit, the Des Moines Register reports:

Democrats’ stance on gay marriage ruined the livelihood of the owners of Gortz Haus Gallery, Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz said Saturday.
“Today, the modern Democratic party has decided their devotion to mandatory gay marriage in all 50 states is so unforgiving that there is no longer room for defending religious liberty,” Cruz told a group in Johnston.

*Rep. Steve King, a Republican representing western portions of Iowa, suggested that legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide could lead to civil war, Real Clear Politics reports:

Iowa Representative Steve King, a Republican, on Thursday suggested that a Supreme Court ruling striking down state bans on gay marriage could lead to civil war.
The nation’s highest court heard arguments in a case challenging bans in Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Kentucky on April 28. A ruling, which could lead to nationwide marriage equality, is expected in the next week.
Speaking to social conservatives gathered this week at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference, King warned that a ruling that doesn’t uphold the bans could lead to civil unrest, much like the high court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery.

“Well, that turned into a civil war – 600,000 people killed to put an end to slavery – to sort that mess out,” King said.
He went on to compare the pending decision to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that found women have a right to abortion.
“Fast forward to Roe v. Wade, 1973, and what happens with that? The Supreme Court decides they are going to decide for us a huge social question, not rooted in law or the constitution,” King said. “They made it up as they went along, and what happens? We march every year until we come back to celebrate the end of Roe v. Wade.”

*An Iowa lawmaker suggested that LGBT advocates violated the law at an anti-bullying summit, Addictinginfo reports:

Iowa Safe Schools is an anti-bullying advocacy group that hosts a yearly summit to address the issue of bullying of LGBT youth in the school system in the state of Iowa. Sounds great, right? Well, not so great to the Iowa GOP. As we all know, conservatives generally despise anything promoting the acceptance of anyone not straight and Christian in schools, because they are absolutely terrified that their kids might actually grow up to not hate those icky, sinful gays. Well, the GOP contingent of the Iowa legislature has taken its hate and fear of LGBT people to a whole other level. They actually want to put the people who are organizing the summit in jail.
Iowa GOP Rep. Greg Heartsill is so outraged at the summit taking place that he has been actively organizing his Republican colleagues in the Iowa legislature to put a stop to it by any means necessary — up to and including criminal prosecution.

South Dakota
*Sioux Falls Pride Festival was held over the weekend. The event is the largest in South Dakota, the Argus Leader reports:

The festival is one of many around the nation hosted in June. Festival Chairman Thomas Christiansen tells KDLT-TV the event aims to celebrate the LGBT community but also raise awareness of discrimination and prejudice.
Christiansen says they added beer and puppies to the festival this year.
Organizers say more than 2,000 people from South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska came to the festival last year.
The festival comes just before the U.S. Supreme Court is expected rule on whether same-sex couples can legally wed.

Wisconsin
*A Madison pastor is bucking trends and supporting marriage equality, Madison.com reports:

By age 16, the Rev. Everett Mitchell already had spent a year preaching at black Baptist churches around his native Fort Worth, Texas.
He’d felt called by God to the ministry as a high school freshman, yet some tenets of his church’s theology troubled him.
Women couldn’t be pastors, although when he looked around, most of the church’s members were women, and they were providing most of the funding, spiritual direction and labor.
“I felt if the male leaders of the church were wrong on that, what else were they wrong about?” he said.
Mitchell, now 38, would go on to question other religious principles, something he’s doing in a big way as pastor of Christ the Solid Rock Baptist Church in Madison. He supports same-sex marriage, and last August married two female church members in the church’s sanctuary.
In taking this position, he is bucking strong cultural and religious traditions in the black community. Although support for same-sex marriage in the U.S. is at a record high of 57 percent, a slight majority of black citizens still oppose it, and black Protestants remain especially resistant, with just 33 percent in favor.