Ahead of President Obama’s signing of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal today, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) — who sits on the House Armed Services Committee — predicted that ending the military’s discriminatory policy would lead to a segregation of gay and straight troops. “You’re going to accommodate folks’ preferences as to whether or not they want to be in the same sleeping arrangements or bathroom facilities, all those kinds of things,” Conaway told the Wichita Falls Times Recorder Monday:

Conaway said he thinks the military will have to provide heterosexual troops with separate arrangements if they don’t want to bunk with gays or lesbians, as well as do the same for gays and lesbians who don’t want to share living quarters with heterosexuals.

“Apparently their housing arrangements are not set up in that direction,” Conaway said. “And if you have to segment them further from what they are just between men and women, then you’re going to have to provide additional facilities that weren’t provided before.”

The housing expenditures will be coming at a time when lawmakers should be cutting spending across the federal government, he said.

“And this is in my view an unnecessary or unneeded change,” Conaway said.

If Conaway had bothered to read the Pentagon’s comprehensive report on repealing the policy released last month, he would have seen that on page 13, it clearly states, “we recommend that the Department of Defense expressly prohibit berthing or billeting assignments or the designation of bathroom facilities based on sexual orientation.” It noted that a “separate but equal” approach would stigmatize gays, much the way racial segregation did for African-Americans before they were fully integrated into the armed forces. Of course, the study also showed that the vast majority of servicemembers have no problem serving alongside openly gay fellow soldiers, suggesting that the wave of self-segregation Conaway predicts is merely a project of his personal fears.

Indeed, Clarke Cooper, the executive director of the conservative pro-gay group Log Cabin Republicans and himself an Iraq War veteran, called Conaway’s prediction “nonsensical,” and said his comments are “narrow and fallacious.” “He is under the assumption that they will accommodate people’s preferences — No, it’s the military. There are no preferences so to speak,” Cooper told the Texas Independent. “You are going to get assigned your lodging based on unit structure not based on personal preferences.” Noting that Conaway served in the Army and now sits on the House committee that deals with the military, Cooper added, “Some of the politicians that oppose DADT have never really interacted with the military or have never visited. But Conaway knows better and that’s why I am truly disappointed.”

Yesterday, the Census Bureau released a new congressional apportionment map which gives more Congressional seats to the South and the West at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest. One of the states that will lose a congressional seat is Louisiana.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) released a statement yesterday expressing his outrage. According to Vitter, undocumented immigrants are to blame for Louisiana’s loss of a congressional seat:

“Even though we’ve been expecting this, the confirmation that Louisiana will lose a congressional seat is frustrating. Last year, I tried to prevent this from happening with my amendment to require a citizenship question on the census and to prevent the counting of illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment,” said Vitter.

“Now, Louisiana stands to lose clout in Congress, while states that welcome illegal immigrants stand to unfairly benefit from artificially inflated population totals.”

As Vitter notes, last year, he and Robert Bennett (R-UT) attempted to add an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill that would require the U.S. Census Bureau to add a question about immigration status to its 2010 survey. According to Vitter, undocumented immigrants should be specifically identified and cut out of congressional reapportionment decisions because they “dilute” the voting power of the rest of the population.

The Fourteenth Amendment clearly stipulates that representation should be determined by “counting the whole number of persons in each State.” Asking a citizenship question would’ve likely dissuaded undocumented immigrants from participating in the Census in the first place. Widespread non-participation would have lead to inaccurate demographic information and costly mistakes in infrastructure, education, and health care planning. That’s why children, ex-felons, legal residents, and several other nonvoters are also included in the census apportionment data.

For those reasons, Vitter’s proposal fell flat on its face. The census questionnaire didn’t include a single question on immigration status. So, it’s odd that Vitter is now complaining that “states that welcome illegal immigrants” are going to benefit at Louisiana’s expense when he doesn’t even have any census data to base that on.

What the new census data does show is that the Latino population is rapidly expanding across the country and will nearly triple to about 130 million by mid-century. Of course, not all Latinos are immigrants and they’re certainly not all undocumented. Yet if Vitter’s race-baiting campaign ads are any indication, the senator of Louisiana has a hard time distinguishing between the two.

Vitter has also failed to acknowledge that migrants — many of them undocumented — have given Louisiana a much-needed population boost and helped rebuild its infrastructure following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Demographers point to the state’s sluggish growth over the past decade that put it “on track to lose a seat in the House of Representatives and one of its nine electoral votes anyway.”

Cross-posted at the Wonk Room.