Earlier this month, newly-inaugurated Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) kicked off his term by issuing a narrow non-discrimination order for state employees, which addressed only race, gender, creed, color and national origin and did not provide protections for sexual orientation. Now, Cooper Levey-Baker of the Florida Independent discovers that the Florida Republican National Committee is up with a new website which calls for “equal justice and equal opportunity for all,” except for gay people:

I Believe…

In equal right, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, age, sex or national origin.

Look:

Florida has already been recognized by eQualityGiving.com for being one of the least gay-friendly states in America, and until recently it was the only state to explicitly prohibit gays and lesbians from adopting. In 2008, the state amended its constitution to prohibit gays and lesbians from seeking civil unions, much less marriage.

In December, however, Equality Florida released a report claiming that the recent repeal of the adoption ban and additional laws protecting gay people in various levels of government ranked the state “among the top five states in the nation in protecting its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered citizens from discrimination.” The report found that “the majority of Florida’s citizens also now live in communities that have ordinances outlawing discrimination in both employment and housing based on sexual orientation,” and Floridians are protected by a 2008 state law which tries to prevent bullying in public schools based on sexual orientation. One out of three Floridians “can also take advantage of domestic partnership registries or public employee domestic partner benefits.”

However, if the Florida GOP’s website and the Governor’s executive order are any indication, equality may once again be on the decline in the state. The national GOP’s 2008 platform didn’t include gay people either. “We consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin to be immoral, and we will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes,” that document read.

Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (R-CA)

Last month, in a final effort to derail the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tried to attach an amendment to the stripped-down National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have required the Service Chiefs to certify that implementation did not compromise military readiness or unit cohesion. The amendment would have likely extended the current certification process — which already includes the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and President Obama — and undermined the intent of the legislation and the wishes of military leadership. Now, AmericaBlog’s Joe Sudbay notes that Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (R-CA), who infamously said that the military “isn’t the YMCA” during floor debate, is similarly planning to “introduce legislation next week designed to put the brakes on repeal of the military’s ban on openly gay troops”:

The measure by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) would add the four military service chiefs to the list of those who must sign off on repealing the policy before it can be officially scrapped.

Hunter, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, is concerned that the bill passed in December repealing the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy “excluded the service chiefs from the certification process,” said one congressional aide.

Republicans have long sought to include the Service Chiefs because as a group, the Chiefs are generally less sanguine about repeal than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen. During their testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in early December, two of the Service Chiefs endorsed the Pentagon Working Group’s recommendation to lift the ban, while two others had mixed reactions. Gen. James Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, has warned lawmakers that repeal could endanger the lives of Marines. Regardless of their views, however, all four Chiefs said they trusted Gates to address their concerns before eliminating the policy and warned Republicans that expanding the certification process could undermine the chain of command:

Senator THUNE: Do you believe that the implementing legislation, if in fact this moves forward, should allow for the chiefs, the servicemembers, any of you, to certify? [...]

General CASEY: Senator, as I said to Senator Lieberman, I am very comfortable with my ability to provide input to Secretary Gates and to the Chairman that will be listened to and considered. So you could put it in there, but I don’t think it’s necessary. [...] It might take it up a notch. But believe me, I will make sure that my views are heard. The other thing. If you put that into the law, I think it undercuts the Goldwater-Nichols, that we’ve been trying to put the Chairman as the principal provider of military advice. So that’s something for the committee to consider.

Senator THUNE. Anybody else care to comment on that?

Admiral ROUGHEAD. Sir, I’m very comfortable with the access and the input that we’ve had. In fact, as the report came along I could see the changes that we were recommending. So I have no concerns whatsoever about my advice not being heard.

Watch it around 4:30:

While Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the staunchest defender of DADT, has made peace with its bipartisan repeal (the measure passed in the House by a vote of 250 – 175 and 64-31 in the Senate), Hunter isn’t the only Republican who is still clinging to the ban. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) has also promised to reinstate the policy.

The federal and most state governments treat dependent benefits for domestic partners as taxable earned income and require gay and lesbian people to pay additional taxes from which straight married relationships are exempt. The law, however, is not uniform. In some states, including those that recognize same-sex marriages, couples aren’t subject to the unfair tax on the state level, but still have to pay federal taxes on any benefits their partners receive.

As 61 same-sex couples at Yale discovered earlier this year, this two-tier system sometimes leads to bureaucratic errors that result in significant economic hardships:

An accounting error by Yale is forcing same-sex couples who work for the University to pay double in tax withholdings this year.

Same-sex married couples are recognized by the state of Connecticut, but not by the federal government — meaning their tax returns are treated differently on each level. These couples are taxed by the federal government, but not by the state government, on the amount of their partner’s health coverage, and Yale affected approximately 60 employees University-wide by failing to withhold income equal to their domestic partner’s health coverage in 2010. Now, the University is making those employees pay back the appropriate amounts by deducting the funds from their 2011 income. [...]

The University notified employees of the error in a letter sent on Dec. 22, apologizing for the mistake and informing workers that Yale would deduct the needed amounts from January, February and March paychecks.

The letter explained that the payroll system accidentally computed 2010 benefits as non-taxable on both the state and federal levels.

The New York Times explains that “same-sex couples are all too familiar with the extra financial costs and complications that can arise because their marriages are not recognized by the federal government.” As a result of this particular computer error, “paying the tax back over a three-month period would reduce take-home pay by 33 percent — and that doesn’t even include the taxes owed for this year”:

If the employee paid the tax back over the course of the year, take-home pay would shrink by 8.3 percent (or double that, at nearly 17 percent, when factoring in this year’s taxes). The employee said some workers owed $2,000 a year in taxes (which means they would need to pay a total of $4,000 this year), while others owed close to $4,000 (translating into $8,000 total), though those numbers were likely to vary based on the value of the benefits and the tax bracket of the employee.

A growing number of companies — like Google — begin begun covering the cost of the extra tax that heterosexual married couples do not pay, but for now, Yale is not one of them. According to a study conducted by the Center for American Progress and the Williams Institute, gay people pay $1,069 per year more in taxes than would a married employee with the same coverage. Collectively, “unmarried couples lose $178 million per year to additional taxes” and U.S. employers “pay a total of $57 million per year in additional payroll taxes because of this unequal tax treatment.”

According to a recent study published in Health Affairs, the extra tax burden results in lower levels of insurance for partnered gay and lesbians as compared to their heterosexual counterparts. “Partnered gay men are less than half as likely (42 percent) as married heterosexual men to get employer-sponsored dependent coverage, and partnered lesbians have an even slimmer chance (28 percent) of getting dependent coverage compared to married heterosexual women.”

Ultimately, Congress has to extend the employer-coverage tax exclusion to domestic partnership benefits. The House version of the health care bill included this provision, but it was ultimately kept out of the final law.

Dave Weigel has this clip of Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) explaining why he supports reinstating the Don’t Ask, Dont’ Tell policy that a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted to repeal last year:

Q: My question was, how would putting it back into place effect our military?

PAWLENTY: I don’t think it would impact it at all because as I understand it they’re going to slowly roll out the program, so if ends up going back in, I don’t know that it would effect it.

Watch it at 1:41:

Putting the program “back in,” as Pawlenty describes it, would not only heighten the very sense of uncertainty that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman sought to avoid by urging Congress to repeal the law during the lame duck session, but it would also leave the military vulnerable to a court decision that would force sudden repeal. Gates described a court injunction of DADT in October as a “wake-up call” that the law could be struck down immediately without giving the military time to prepare for the change. ” Since Congress passed repeal, Gates has also promised to begin repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell “as quickly but as responsibly as possible” and has said that the Pentagon was approaching the task with the philosophy of, it’s better to end the policy “sooner rather than later.”

It’s also unclear how reinstating the policy would work operationally. Bringing back the policy would require gay servicemembers who come out after repeal is certified to suddenly go back into the closet or face discharge. Straight soldiers would also have to pretend they did not know about the sexual orientation of formerly-out gay members.