After drawn-out debate on Friday, the Hawaii House of Representatives voted to pass a marriage-equality bill last night 30 to 19, with two absences.

SB1 will now go to the Senate, which already passed a same-sex marriage measure last week, and then on to Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who has said he will happily sign it into law.

In a statement, Abercrombie said:

"I commend the House of Representatives for taking this historic vote to move justice and equality forward. After more than 50 hours of public testimony from thousands of testifiers on both sides of the issue, evaluating dozens of amendments, and deliberating procedures through hours of floor debates, the House passed this significant bill, which directly creates a balance between marriage equity for same-sex couples and protects our First Amendment freedoms for religious organizations...

I am confident that the Senate will address the bill in the same spirit. I look forward to a successful conclusion to this major step in affirming everyone's civil rights."

The Senate will hold its concurrence vote on Tuesday. Should all go well, gay couples will be able to marry in the Aloha State on December 2. (Feature photo: Michelle Broder Van Dyke/Buzzfeed)

Barack Obama spent his time in Hawaii snorting coke and sleeping with older white dudes. That's the story Mia Marie Pope is telling whomever will listen.

Pope, reportedly a classmate of Obama's in Hawaii, says the future president chased daddies to get get drugs:

He always portrayed himself as a foreign student. Girls were never anything that he ever was interested in ... He would get with these older white gay men, and this is how we just pretty much had the impression that that's how he was procuring his cocaine.

He was having sex with these older white guys and that's how he was getting this cocaine to be able to freebase.

The Obama-is-gay meme has been touted by the reactionary right almost as much as  the birther nonsense: In 2012, Tea Party author Jerome Corsi claimed Barack was a regular at Chicago bathhouses. "Obama used to go to the gay bars during the week, most often on Wednesday, and they said he was very much into older white guys."

And earlier this year, right-wing pundit Dave Daubenmire suggested Obama come out of the closet and "admit he's the first openly gay president or, better yet, openly bisexual president?"

We hear the Tea Party is also trying to plant rumors that the President ripped the tags off all the mattresses in the White House.

We reported last week on the donation by Banksy of an original work to NYC AIDS charity Housing Works: The art-world It Boy purchased a painting at a Housing Works thrift shop, added some original elements (like a Nazi in full uniform), and gave it back to the organization to auction, with experts saying it could fetch as much as $1 million.

The winning bid was actually $615,000, but now it looks like the transaction has fallen through as the buyer has failed to make good.

A representative for bidder in Minneapolis said he was notified about the dealing falling through on Monday:  "I get an email saying basically the bidder has canceled and to call him right away," said the rep.

When the Minneapolis collector begged off, the remaining top bidders were contacted and eventually the painting was sold—though the price it fetched and the buyer are being kept private.

Appearing before the Luxembourg-based tribunal, the three men—from Sierra Leone, Senegal and Uganda—claimed they faced harassment and violence for being gay if they returned to their native lands. Initially a Dutch court rejected their petitions—and went so far as to suggest the trio "exercise restraint" to avoid persecution.

But the EU's highest court overturned that ruling—agreeing the men had a "well-founded" fear of reprisal if they returned home, and chastizing the lower court for its opinion. "A person's sexual orientation is a characteristic so fundamental to his identity that he should not be forced to renounce it," the Court ruled.

But it's not enough to simply be gay in a hostile environment, the justices clarified. "The acts of persecution must be sufficiently serious by their nature of repetition as to constitute a severe violation of human rights."