Rick Santorum doubled down on his opposition to same-sex marriage during an appearance in Iowa this morning, arguing that the courts have established a “super-right” of “sexual liberty” that trumps religious freedom:

Santorum was meeting with the Register editorial board this morning. He said same-sex marriage jeopardizes religious liberty because the government may threaten license-holder such as marriage counselors who don’t treat gay couples.

“Religious liberty is now trumped because we have now created a super-right,” he said. “We have a right the Constitution of religious liberty but now the courts have created a super-right that’s above a right that’s actually in the Constitution, and that’s of sexual liberty. And I think that’s a wrong, that’s a destructive element.” [...]

Santorum says if “pursuit of happiness” means “pursuit of pleasure,” we won’t be a country very long.

Now, if you swap out the references to “same-sex marriage” and replace them with “tolerance towards African Americans,” Santorum’s thinking would read like this: “We have a right the Constitution of religious liberty but now the courts have created a super-right that’s above a right that’s actually in the Constitution, and that’s of sexual liberty tolerance of African Americans. And I think that’s a wrong, that’s a destructive element.”

See what I did there? If Santorum wants religion to override the equal protections of individuals, he can’t just stop at the gays (the group that he opposes on religious grounds). He has to extend that the same courtesy to religious people who believe in oppressing black people or Asian people or people with disabilities. It’s a fairly bigoted mind set and one that Santorum surely wouldn’t want to apply to other minority groups. But the fact that he would apply it to gay people reveals what he truly thinks of them.

The National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) Brian Brown announced that Tim Pawlenty will sign on to the group’s anti-gay marriage pledge, after initially refusing to join Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann in agreeing to the document. The group is asking candidates to support a federal constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex unions, appoint socially conservative judges, and “investigate” the intimidation of same-sex marriage opponents.

NOM had been urging its members to call Pawlenty and ask him to sign the pledge, characterizing his initial refusal as “peculiar.” Marriage is “an important issue on the federal level and we’re very excited that not only three, but now a fourth candidate has signed on — Tim Pawlenty we got word last night is signing on,” Brown said during an appearance on MSNBC this afternoon.

Watch the entire segment:

Yesterday, Maggie Gallagher explained Pawlenty’s snub this way: “Pawlenty’s communications director, Ann Marie Hauser, personally informed me on Tuesday that Tim Pawlenty would not sign NOM’s marriage pledge,” she said. “Like many people, we are scratching our heads wondering why Gov. Pawlenty, who has been a champion for marriage in Minnesota, would not commit to doing so for America.”

Last evening, National Public Radio’s ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, responded to criticism about Alix Spiegel’s story on ex-gay therapy that aired Monday morning. The nine-minute piece, which profiled ex-gay Rich Wyler and ex-gay survivor Peterson Toscano, had two major flaws. First, it created a false balance by suggesting that ex-gay therapy may be legitimate and is still up for debate. Second, it omitted the fact that Wyler makes his entire living perpetuating the false ideas of ex-gay therapy. Rather than admit the mistakes of the piece and apologize for the potential harm done by it, Schumacher-Matos, Spiegel, Spiegel’s editor, and NPR’s senior vice president all defended the piece, making only very small concessions about how it was reported. In doing so, they continued propagating false ideas about ex-gay therapy and the false balance of their reporting. Here are 10 problems with NPR’s response:

1. TOSCANO’S REMARKS MISREPRESENTED: Spiegel defended her piece by saying “From Toscano’s perspective, there might be a handful of people like Wyler who benefit from this therapy.” But that was a complete misrepresentation of what Toscano said, as he clarified on his own blog yesterday:

TOSCANO: In particular Alix Spiegel summarized something I said and reported that I felt that reparative therapy can help a handful of people. No, absolutely not. Over at Beyond Ex-Gay we recognize that some say they have been helped by ex-gay treatment. For our part the treatments did not work and usually caused us damage. From meeting over 1,500 ex-gay survivors and seeing up close the lives of many ex-gays and from understanding the positive outcomes from working with ethical trained professionals compared, I believe ex-gay treatment is unnecessary, ineffectual, and most often damaging.

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On August 5, 1995 President Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order that established uniform standards for granting security clearances and prohibited the government from denying clearances on the basis of sexual orientation, Box Turtle Bulletin’s Jim Burroway notes. Until then, federal agencies were reluctant to issue clearances to gay people on the assumption that they were “at risk of being black mailed or otherwise compromised.”

The prohibitive policy originated from President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Oder 10450, which tasked the government with investigating federal employees and delineated specific prohibited behaviors — like “intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion” — that could keep Americans from obtaining sensitive government positions. As David Johnson explains in The Lavender Scare, as a result of the order, “national security would [now] require not only political loyalty but also proper morality.” Eisenhower himself clarified in his personal papers that this new understanding of morality would exclude members of the LGBT community. “Many loyal Americans, by reason of instability, alcoholism, homosexuality, or previous tendencies to associates with Communist-front groups, are unintentionally security risks,” he wrote. Over 10,000 gay and lesbian employees were forced out of their jobs during the 1950s and 60s as a result of the policy.

Eisenhower’s order was lifted in 1975, but Clinton went a step further, adding “sexual orientation to the non-discrimination clause.” A screen shot of the Associated Press story:

Interestingly, Clinton’s actions were denounced by the very same groups who are still fighting against LGBT equality today. The Family Research Council’s Robert Maginnis wrote, “in all healthy societies, homosexuality is recognized as a pathology with very serious implications for a person’s behavior. … Even more importantly for security concerns, this is a behavior that is associated with a lot of anti-security markers such as drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity and violence.”

A new documentary about government discrimination against gays and lesbians is currently in production. Watch the trailer here.