Nebraska's Antigay Governor to Attend Lesbian Sister's Wedding

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, who is still appealing a federal judge's March ruling striking down the state's ban on same-sex marriage, will be attending his sister's wedding to another woman today, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

The Republican governor, who denounced the federal pro-equality ruling as "an activist judge" substituting "his personal political preferences for the will of the people," will attend the wedding of his sister, Laura Ricketts, to Brooke Skinner, a strategist for Twitter, in Chicago today, reports the Nebraska newspaper.

The World-Herald describes Laura Ricketts as a leader in Chicago's "gay-rights movement," a prominent force in the successful effort to establish marriage equality in Illinois, and as "the leader of LPAC, a lesbian-backed political action committee."

In addition to opposing marriage equality in Nebraska, Gov. Ricketts has since 2013 objected to the Chicago Cubs baseball team sponsoring Chicago's Pride celebration. The Ricketts family owns the team, according to the World-Herald.

"My sister is gay," then-candidate Ricketts told the World-Herald in 2013. "I love her, but I disagree with her on this issue."

Although Ricketts's administration did recently announce that it would stop enforcing Nebraska's longstanding ban on placing children up for adoption with gay foster parents, the governor's office is still defending a legal challenge to that 1995 policy filed by three same-sex couples in Lincoln.