ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota state senators debated whether to allow gay marriage in this Midwestern state, with a vote in favor expected later Monday to send the bill to the Democratic governor for his promised signature.

"With just a few words, we have the ability to bring families acrossMinnesota into the full sunshine of equality and freedom," said the bill's sponsor, Sen. Scott Dibble, a Minneapolis Democrat.

The measure would grant "civil marriages" to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples starting Aug. 1, making Minnesota the 12th state to legalize gay marriage and the first in the Midwest to pass such a measure out of its legislature. Iowa allows gay weddings due to a 2009 court ruling.

Gov. Mark Dayton has pledged to sign the bill and could do it as early as Tuesday.

Crowds of demonstrators flocked to the Capitol in even greater numbers than Thursday, when the House passed the bill by a 75-59 vote.

While supporters and opponents were close to evenly matched last week, Monday was dominated by gay marriage backers. They taped blue and orange hearts on the Capitol steps, creating a path into the building for lawmakers with the signature colors of their movement. In the rotunda, they sang songs including "Over the Rainbow," ''Going to the Chapel" and "The Star-Spangled Banner."

At the start of the Senate debate, Republican opponents raised concerns that the bill doesn't go far enough to protect people and organizations with faith-based objections from refusing business related to gay weddings.

"Are we going to have the treads of history roll over people of religious faith?" asked Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove.

But a majority of senators rejected a Republican amendment to increase the bill's religious protections, as gay marriage supporters argued it would have gutted civil rights protections for gay people.

Outside the Senate chamber, the mood among gay marriage supporters was growing more celebratory. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman ordered the Wabasha Street Bridge near downtown festooned in rainbow-striped gay pride flags to mark the occasion, and temporarily renamed it the "Freedom to Marry Bridge." He also proclaimed it "Freedom to Marry Week" in the capital city.

Micah Thaun Tran, of Golden Valley, has been with his partner for 13 years and said they're planning a fall wedding in Grand Marais along the northern shore of Lake Superior, a small ceremony with friends and family. He was also present for the House vote Thursday and said he couldn't stay away as the final vote was taken.

"Today I just want to be a spectator of history," Tran said. "It is just so validating."

Jeff Moses and his legal husband, John Westerfield-Moses, of Minneapolis, got married in Iowa four years ago and were excited their home state is ready to follow suit. Their anniversary is Aug. 23, a few weeks after a Minnesota law would take effect. They're considering having a marriage ceremony here, too.

"Any excuse for a party," Jeff Moses said.

John Westerfield-Moses said he knew this day would come.

"It was bound to happen," he said. "It was a train that was coming."

Even opponents viewed the bill's passage as inevitable. Don Lee, of Eagan, placed a tombstone on the Capitol lawn with the words "R.I.P. MARRIAGE 2013."

"The legislation being passed today is the end of marriage as we know it in Minnesota," Lee said. "It's a transformation from a forward-looking sacrificial institution to one focused on adult desires. .... People don't realize the damage they are doing. It's a fight against biology."

John Helmberger, head of the main opposition group Minnesotans for Marriage, told those on his side that conventional wisdom about the bill's fate shouldn't be trusted.

"Pray today for God to intervene," he said, addressing a smaller contingent of foes than were in the Capitol days earlier.

Like Thursday, there was a stepped-up security presence. State troopers were posted inside and out, and areas of the building were cordoned off to allow lawmakers to move freely amid the expected throngs.

FILE - In this Sept. 14, 2012 file photo, Libyan military guards check one of the U.S. Consulate's burnt out buildings during a visit by Libyan President Mohammed el-Megarif, not shown, to the U.S. Consulate to express sympathy for the death of the American ambassador, Chris Stevens and his colleagues in the deadly attack on the Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Senior State Department officials pressed for changes in the talking points that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used after the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya last September, expressing concerns that Congress might criticize the Obama administration for ignoring warnings of a growing threat in Benghazi. (AP Photo/Mohammad Hannon)

In this photo provided by CBS News Sunday, May 12, 2013, Ambassador Thomas Pickering speaks on CBS's "Face the Nation" in Washington Sunday. Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led an investigation of the Benghazi attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three others. His report about security at the Benghazi outpost was highly critical, but he stands by his assessment that decisions about the consulate were made well below the Secretary of State level. (AP Photo/CBS News, Chris Usher)

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans pushed ahead Monday with their investigation of the deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year as President Barack Obamaasserted that GOP charges of a cover-up are baseless.

The latest Republican focus is the independent review that slammed the State Department for inadequate security at the installation before the twin nighttime attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked the two authors of the investigation — veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — to meet privately with committee staff to answer questions about their review. Democrats countered that if Congress wants to talk to them, Issa should hold a full open hearing.

Republicans insist that the Obama administration misled Congress and the American people in the immediate aftermath of the attack, trying to play down an act of terrorism that would reflect poorly on Obama weeks before the 2012 presidential election.

Emails disclosed Friday showed that State Department and other senior administration officials pushed for references to prior warnings and al-Qaida to be deleted from the talking points used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice five days after the attack. One email suggested that Congress could use those issues as ammunition against the State Department.

At a White House news conference, Obama dismissed the GOP focus on the talking points as a politically driven "sideshow," pointing out that he said "act of terror" on Sept. 12 and the talking points assessment was similar to the daily presidential briefing he had received.

He also noted that Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told Congress that Benghazi was a terrorist attack with potential links to al-Qaida three days after Rice's appearance on five Sunday talk shows.

"So if this was some effort on our part to try to downplay what had happened or tamp it down, that would be a pretty odd thing that three days later we end up putting out all the information that in fact has now served as the basis for everybody recognizing that this was a terrorist attack and that it may have included elements that were planned by extremists inside of Libya," the president said. "Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down for three days?"

While Obama did refer to Benghazi as an act of terror, the president also cited protests over an anti-Islamic video in several interviews days after the attack, as did Rice on several Sunday news shows. He said Monday that "nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days."

The emails comprising the inter-agency discussion on how to best describe the events in Benghazi were shared with Congress as a condition for allowing the nomination of John Brennan for CIA director to move forward.

The general counsel for the office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed members and staff from the Senate Intelligence panel and leadership on the emails on Feb. 15 at a session in which staff could take notes. A similar briefing took place on March 19 for the House Intelligence panel and leadership staff, according to a senior administration official.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the individual was not allow to publicly discuss the process.

New details on the emails emerged last week. Obama argued that lawmakers had reviewed them several months ago but suddenly they were treated as fresh revelations.

"There's no 'there' there," the president said.

At the State Department, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said her agency didn't review the talking points until the night of Friday, Sept. 14 — "after the reference to al-Qaida had actually been removed."

The succession of revisions to the talking points only partly backs up that statement. A sentence ascribing some of the blame for the attacks to al-Qaida was stricken at 4:42 p.m. on Sept. 14, according to documents published by ABC News. But a reference to previous attacks in the region by al-Qaida-linked extremists remained in the talking points at 6:52 p.m.

Former State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland then complained at 7:39 p.m. and the paragraph was eliminated in the next revision at 8:59 p.m.

Although the talking points were heavily edited, Rice still referred to al-Qaida and extremists when she appeared on the Sunday shows.

"It's clear that there were extremist elements that joined and escalated the violence; whether they were al-Qaida affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al-Qaida itself, I think, is one of the things we'll have to determine," she said.

Issa has argued that Congress needs to get the facts. He wants to hear from Pickering and Mullen about their investigation and he asked that they turn over documents, communications, lists of witnesses, notes and other material by Friday.

He pointed to the testimony of three State Department witnesses last week who criticized the Accountability Review Board's work as incomplete and flawed.

"The White House and the State Department have touted the ARB's report as the definitive account of how and why the Benghazi attacks occurred," Issa said in separate letters to Pickering and Mullen. "It is necessary for the committee to understand whether the criticisms of the ARB's work that we heard from witnesses on May 8, 2013 are valid."

But the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, told Issa that he should bypass private depositions from the two men and go directly to an open hearing on May 22. Issa said to Pickering and Mullen that they would work out a hearing for their public testimony at a later date.

Their blistering report found that "systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels" of the State Department meant that security was "inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place." They absolved former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, faulting lower level State Department officials.

Four State Department officials were reassigned or resigned in the wake of the Pickering-Mullen report.

"We knew where the responsibility rested," Pickering, a career Foreign Service officer who has worked for Republican and Democratic administrations, said Sunday.

For all the Washington furor, a Pew Research Center survey out Monday found the public paid limited attention to last week's House hearing in which a State Department official who was in Tripoli described his helplessness and frustration as the assault unfolded in Benghazi.

The survey found that 44 percent of Americans said they were following the hearings very or fairly closely, about the same percentage as in late January when Clinton testified on Capitol Hill. The number is down from the 61 percent who said they were following the initial stages of the investigation in October.

The survey of 1,000 adults found a split over whether the Obama administration is being honest about the attack and how Republicans are handling the issue, with partisanship affecting opinions. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

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Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper contributed to this report.

Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, leaves the courthouse in Philadelphia Monday, May 13, 2013. Gosnell was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies who authorities say were delivered alive and then killed with scissors at his grimy clinic. He was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the drug-overdose death of a patient who had undergone an abortion. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — An abortion doctor was convicted Monday of first-degree murder and could face execution in the deaths of three babies who were delivered alive and then killed with scissors at his grimy, "house of horrors" clinic.

In a case that became a grisly flashpoint in the nation's abortion debate, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the overdose death of an abortion patient. He was cleared in the death of a fourth baby, who prosecutors say let out a whimper before the doctor cut the spinal cord.

Gosnell, who portrayed himself as an advocate for poor and desperate women in an impoverished West Philadelphia neighborhood, appeared hopeful before the verdict was read and calm afterward.

The jury reached its verdict on its 10th day of deliberations. It will return May 21 to hear evidence on whether Gosnell should get the death penalty.

Gosnell attorney Jack McMahon called it a "very difficult case" to defend and said there was "a little bit of feeling on the defense part of what salmon must feel swimming upstream."

"There's a lot of emotion. You have the baby factor, which is a big problem. The media has been overwhelmingly against him," he said. But noting that Gosnell was cleared on some of the charges, McMahon said the jurors "obviously took their job seriously."

Prosecutors looked elated, but District Attorney Seth Williams declined comment until after the sentencing phase, citing a gag order.

Former clinic employees testified that Gosnell routinely performed illegal abortions pastPennsylvania's 24-week limit, that he delivered babies who were still moving, whimpering or breathing, and that he and his assistants dispatched the newborns by "snipping" their spines, as he referred to it.

"Are you human?" prosecutor Ed Cameron snarled during closing arguments. "To med these women up and stick knives in the backs of babies?"

Gosnell was also convicted of infanticide, racketeering and more than 200 counts of violating Pennsylvania's abortion laws by performing third-term abortions or failing to counsel women 24 hours in advance. The courtroom was locked for more than 30 minutes as the verdicts were read and the jurors polled one by one.

His co-defendant, former clinic employee Eileen O'Neill, was convicted of taking part in a corrupt organization and illegally billing for her services as if she were a licensed doctor.

The jury foreman let out big sigh before the verdicts were read and looked stressed. Another juror was seen crying.

The gruesome details came out more than two years ago during an investigation of prescription drug trafficking at Gosnell's clinic. Investigators said it was a foul-smelling "house of horrors" with bags and bottles of fetuses, including jars of severed feet, along with bloodstained furniture, dirty medical instruments, and cats roaming the premises.

Pennsylvania authorities had failed to conduct routine inspections of all its abortion clinics for 15 years by the time Gosnell's facility was raided. In the scandal's aftermath, two top state health officials were fired, and Pennsylvania imposed tougher rules for clinics.

Four former clinic employees pleaded guilty to murder and four more to other charges. They include Gosnell's wife, Pearl, a cosmetologist who helped perform abortions.

Both sides in the highly charged abortion debate endorsed the verdict.

"This has helped more people realize what abortion is really about," said David O'Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee. He said he hopes the case results in more states passing bills that prohibit abortion "once the unborn child can feel pain."

Supporters of legalized abortion said the case was a preview of what poor, desperate young women could face if abortion is driven underground with more restrictive laws.

"Kermit Gosnell has been found guilty and will get what he deserves. Now, let's make sure these women are vindicated by delivering what all women deserve: access to the full range of health services including safe, high-quality and legal abortion care," said Ilyse G. Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Midway through the six-week trial, anti-abortion activists accused the mainstream media of deliberately ignoring the case. Major news organizations denied it, though a number promptly sent reporters to cover the trial. About 30 reporters were in court for the verdict.

After prosecutors rested their five-week case, Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Minehart threw out for lack of evidence three of seven murder counts involving aborted fetuses. That left the jury to weigh charges involving fetuses identified as Baby A, Baby C, Baby D and Baby E.

Prosecution experts said one was nearly 30 weeks along when the abortion took place, and was so big that Gosnell allegedly joked the baby could "walk to the bus." A second baby was said to be alive for about 20 minutes before a clinic worker snipped the neck. A third was born in a toilet and was moving before another clinic employee severed the spinal cord, according to testimony.

Baby E let out a whimper before Gosnell cut the neck, prosecutors alleged. Gosnell was acquitted in that baby's death, the only one of the four in which no one testified to seeing the baby killed.

Gosnell's attorney argued that none of the fetuses was born alive and that any movements were posthumous twitching or spasms.

Gosnell did not testify, and his lawyer called no witnesses in his defense. But McMahon branded prosecutors "elitist" and "racist" for pursuing his client, who is black and whose patients were mostly poor minorities.

"I wanted to be an effective, positive force in the minority community," Gosnell told The Philadelphia Daily News in a 2010 interview. "I believe in the long term I will be vindicated."

The defense also contended that the 2009 death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar of Woodbridge, Va., a Bhutanese immigrant who had been given repeated doses of Demerol and other powerful drugs to sedate her and induce labor, was caused by unforeseen complications and did not amount to murder, as prosecutors charged.

Bernard Smalley, a lawyer for the woman's family, said he now hopes to bring "some sense of justice and quiet to this family that's been through so much."

Gosnell still faces federal drug charges. Authorities said that he ranked third in the state for OxyContin prescriptions and that he left blank prescription pads at his office and let staff members make them out to cash-paying patients.

He performed thousands of abortions over a 30-year career, some on patients as young as 13. Authorities said the medical practice alone netted him about $1.8 million a year, much of it in cash. Authorities found $250,000 hidden in a bedroom when they searched his house. Gosnell also owned a beach home and several rental properties.

"He created an assembly line with no regard for these women whatsoever," Cameron said. "And he made money doing that."