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You ranked them: 10 top stories in America in 2013

Here are 10 top stories Americans followed in 2013, ranked by respondents to a Monitor/TIPP poll according to the percentage who said they followed the story very closely.

7. DOMA is struck down, a turning point for gay rights (37 percent)

Carolyn Kaster/ AP/ File
Edith Windsor waves to supporters in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington on March 27, 2013, after the court heard arguments on her challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The high court struck down DOMA on June 26.

  • By CSM Staff

The campaign to achieve equal rights for gays and lesbians gained momentum in 2013. The number of states fully embracing gay marriage rose from nine to 16, evidencing a significant shift in public opinion. And on June 26 the US Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The 1996 law limited the receipt of a thousand federal benefits solely to those in marriages of one man and one woman. But in a landmark 5-to-4 decision, the justices invalidated the statute as a deprivation of "equal liberty" and "equal dignity."

The decision stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Edie Windsor of New York City, who faced a $363,000 estate tax bill after the death of her lifelong partner, Thea Spyer. Had her spouse been a man, Ms. Windsor would have owed no tax.

The case left unresolved the broader question of whether the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage, or whether those rights will be decided on a state-by-state basis.

– Warren Richey, Staff writer 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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