Good As You’s Jeremy Hooper finds this video of the May 24 “MayDay for Marriage” rally in Albany, New York — an event that was part of a larger tour organized by the Family Research Foundation to oppose marriage equality in the state. Speakers argued that gay people live “broken lives,” compared same-sex marriage to polygamy, incest, and drug use, and even endorsed so-called ex-gay therapy:

– “I pray for those whose lives are broken, who through abuse or some other misuse have reasoned that they can live other than how you’ve designed the human race…the healthiest children of all are those with a mother and a father.”

– “OK, what about polygamy, what about incest? [They say] ‘oh no, that’s different.’ How? On what basis?”

– “I’ve counseled a number of homosexuals to come out….They can come out of it. It’s a mutable trait. Just like alcoholics, drug use, they can come out of it. They need the help of the Lord Jesus Christ to do it….but most of them don’t want to do it, they like it.”

Watch it:

For more coverage of a similar anti-gay rally in the Bronx, New York, click here.

Here’s the picture at Texas A&M University: employees can be fired just for their sexual orientation or gender identity, safe sex workshops are secretly infiltrated and then smeared as “pornographic,” and both student senators and state Representatives have been trying to defund the campus’s LGBT resource center by requiring that an equal budget be set aside for an absurdly unnecessary “traditional values center.” The situation is so bad that the Texas Transgender Non-Discrimination Summit abandoned its planned conference at the university this August in favor a safer venue.

A student, Garrett Nichols, is now petitioning A&M’s administrators to right one of those wrongs: adding non-discrimination protections that will protect LGBT employees. He points out that A&M is “the only Tier 1 Institution in the state of Texas that does not offer these protections. (Both the University of Texas and University of Houston include sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies, and UT also includes gender identity.)”

All these efforts to erase the LGBT community from campus and derail services that might support them demand a conversation about why the services are there in the first place. Unlike the mythical services a campus “traditional values center” would hypothetically offer, pro-LGBT policies and resources have significant impacts on the academic success, productivity, recruitment, and retention of students, faculty, and employees. A comprehensive survey of the climate for LGBT people at universities released last year showed that not only do LGBT people experience significant amounts of harassment in higher education, but that those experiences greatly influenced individuals to consider leaving their campuses. Nichols’ effort to protect LGBT employees is in the best interest of the university.

A&M’s conservative groups and unresponsive administrators have sent a clear message that they have no desire to recruit or retain LGBT students or employees. Unlike most universities that vie for the best and brightest, A&M continues to demonstrate that discrimination is its highest priority.

For knowing so little about the reality of LGBT lives, Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) sure likes to talk about how to maintain discrimination against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. At yesterday’s Eagle Forum Collegians 2011 Summit, she offered the following fallacious argument for why young people should oppose marriage equality, with comparisons to polygamy, polyamory, incest, pedophilia, and 3-year-olds driving (via RightWingWatch):

HARTZLER: For instance, you know, if you just care about somebody and you have a committed relationship, why not allow one man and two women, or three women to marry? There are a lot of people in this country that support polygamy. Why not? If they’re committed to each other, why should you care?

Why not allow group marriage? There are people out there who want that. I think it’s call polyamory, it’s got some big name. But anyway, group marriage, I understand it. Well, is that the best policy?

Why not allow an uncle to marry his niece? Why not allow a 50-year-old man to marry a 12-year-old girl if they love each other and they’re committed?

So, pretty soon, if you don’t set parameters, you don’t have any parameters at all, the license means nothing — the marriage means nothing. It’s their right to marry whoever they want, but we’re saying marriage is between a man and a woman. So, there’s a difference there. But it’s not a right in the Constitution as far as that goes either. It’s not a right of anybody — of a 3-year-old to be able to drive a car. You know, the government has set some parameters that they think is correct.

Here’s a quick answer to all of Hartzler’s “Why not?”s: Because nobody is asking for those things. Oh, and also, minors can’t consent and driving is a privilege, not a right.

NOM's Brian Brown at a Rally last summer in New Hampshire.

Coming to a public school near you? That’s how Brian Brown’s latest letter opens, as he is eager as ever to scare National Organization for Marriage supporters about what their kids will learn. But that’s just the president of the organization’s introduction to NOM’s other favorite theme: self-victimizing. Here’s a quick tour through Brown’s latest distortions: “Live and let live? SSM Architects Seek to Silence Christians.”

CLAIM: Teaching kids about gender variation is somehow a bad thing: “‘People can be girls, feel like girls, they can feel like boys, they can feel like both, and they can even feel, like I said, kinda like neither,’ he teaches them. This is a movement that know what it is doing.”

FACT: Alvin McEwen has a whole post dedicated to a lie from the first published draft of this letter, in which Brown suggested the lesson was for Kindergartners, not fourth-graders as was actually the case. Aside from sounding scary about it, Brown doesn’t actually indicate what he thinks is wrong with the gender lesson. Factually, there is nothing wrong.

CLAIM: The United States is a Christian nation: “Could Christianity, which gave birth to America, become an illegitimate stepchild in our own nation?”

FACT: The United States is not a Christian nation, at least not according to President Obama, history professors, or the Founding Fathers themselves.

CLAIM: Marriage equality will make “some people more equal than others” because people who support traditional marriage will be “demoted to second-class citizens.”

FACT: Considering just about every bill that opens marriage rights to same-sex couples explicitly offers protections for religious institutions and leaders, the opposite is true: supporters of traditional marriage are promoted with the privilege to discriminate.

CLAIM: Under Illinois’s new civil union bill, Rockford Catholic Charities had to end its adoption and foster care program because “the threat of litigation made continuing to help these children too risky.”

FACT: Rockford Catholic Charities voluntarily ended their services because they no longer had the right to discriminate against same-sex couples. They prioritized willful discrimination over the needs of children. Christians are not the “victims” of marriage equality advocates’ “intolerance,” as Brown suggests; children are the victims of Catholic Charities’ intolerance towards same-sex couples.

CLAIM: Equality advocates, including GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders), oppose religious protections in Rhode Island’s civil unions bill.

FACT: Brown takes GLAD attorney Karen Loewy’s quote out of context, citing only the last sentence of what she actually said. Her full quote:

This unprecedented exemption means a civil union spouse could be denied the ability to make medical decisions for her spouse in a hospital; it means that a math teacher at a religiously-based school could not get the same health insurance for his legally recognized partner that all other teachers receive. This exemption actually diminishes nondiscrimination protections in public accommodations and employment that Rhode Island employers and institutions have successfully lived with since 1995. It just inflicts gratuitous harm on Rhode Island’s gay and lesbian families.

But Brown, of course, insists that the “gratuitous harm” is done to the religious people and institutions who are forced to not discriminate in opposition to their beliefs.

CLAIM: Opposing ex-gay “reparative” therapy is an attack on people who just want to help, as evidenced by a Great Britain counselor who was found guilty of “professional malpractice.”

FACT: The psychological community is in complete agreement that efforts to change sexual orientation are harmful and do not work. The appropriate therapeutic response for individuals struggling with their sexual orientation is affirmation; there are no points awarded for “being willing to help” when the “help” is dangerous and ineffective.

CLAIM: Equality advocates regularly offer “open, ugly hatred” against opponents, as evidenced by death threats to New York Sen. Rubén Díaz.

FACT: Anonymous threats are not “open.” And while all threats need to be prosecuted, it’s actually members of the LGBT community who regular face bullying and attacks just for being who they are.

Nobody in the LGBT movement approves of death threats, but more importantly, any “open” death threat should be prosecuted. Díaz claims to not preach hate, yet he regularly lies and openly attacks people who are gay and lesbian.

CLAIM: (Via a column by NOM’s other public face, Maggie Gallagher) Because young minds are changing on the issue of abortion, so too can “traditional marriage” rally again in the future.

FACT: Maggie’s claim is wrong on two fronts. First, unlike the polling for marriage equality that has steadily increased, polling for abortion has remained consistently even over time. Secondly, in 2011, more people are again pro-choice than pro-life (49–45 percent).

NOM wants to paint opponents of equality as victims, but it’s hard to have sympathy for people who lie and complain when they lose the right to discriminate against and harm other people.

Last night, the Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee held a tense hearing on a bill that would legalize civil unions and grant gay couples all of the state rights married couples now enjoy, but did not vote on the measure. The bill, which is opposed by some marriage equality proponents, surfaced after House Speaker Gordon Fox announced that he saw “no realistic chance” of passing same-sex marriage legislation “in either the House or Senate.”

Lawmakers have held three hearings this year on bills to enact gay marriage or civil unions and both sides have grown tired of their opposition, the Boston Globe reports. Yesterday’s hearing drew 100 people and lasted three hours:

At Thursday’s hearing one senator got into a heated argument with a pastor testifying against civil unions. After another senator criticized the Catholic Church’s stance during testimony from a priest, a woman in the audience cried out, “Heretic!” [...]

Senators reviewing the measure were evenly divided Thursday.

Sen. Dawson Hodgson, R-North Kingstown, believes gay couples have the same right to marry and have families as heterosexual couples. “These are Americans like all of us,” he said.

Sen. Harold Metts, D-Providence, said he’ll oppose civil unions on religious grounds. “I didn’t write the Bible. God does not change.”

Since Rhode Island already recognizes out-of-state marriages between same-sex couples, some LGBT advocates see the civil unions compromise as a step back in the push for full marriage equality. Martha Holt of Marriage Equality Rhode Island argued that “civil unions would relegate gay couples to second-class status” and spoke out in opposition to “a loophole in the bill that would allow religious cemeteries, hospitals and schools to ignore rights given to gay couples in a civil union.”

The measure passed overwhelmingly in the House and is expected to move to the Senate floor in the coming days. If approved, Rhode Island would become the seventh state to offers such unions.