Rick Perry turned in another underwhelming performance at tonight’s GOP presidential debate in Dartmouth on Tuesday night and signed off by quoting the title of a pro-union, pro-racial justice, and pro-immigrant poem written by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, titled “Let America Be America Again.” Watch his final answer:

The phrase was first appropriated by Rick Santorum, who later dropped the slogan after learning of its origin.

While Hughes is best known for his poetic cries for racial and economic justice, he was also a staunch defender of gay rights. His poem “Cafe: 3 a.m.” criticizes a police raid on a gay establishment, attacking the injustice of arresting gay people because “God, Nature, or somebody made them that way.” Perry, by contrast, signed a pledge opposing same-sex marriage and previously compared homosexuality to alcoholism in his 2008 book about the Boy Scouts. He also supports a Texas law that criminalizes sodomy.

Political advocacy is all about catering to an audience, and those opposed to marriage equality for same-sex couples have been meticulous about how they craft their message. As the Values Voter Summit demonstrated this weekend, they exercise a bit less tact with their words when they are talking amongst themselves than when they are catering to the general public. Recently, two contributors to the Friendly Atheist blog attended a Marriage Symposium organized by the Illinois Family Institute (an American Family Association affiliate) and reported back what they heard. The panel included Austin Nimocks from the Alliance Defense Fund and Linda Jernigan, a self-identified ex-gay. Here are some insights into the thinking and strategies of those opposed to LGBT equality:

• Anti-bullying programs are meant to silence anti-gay beliefs.
• Do not use the term “sexual orientation” because it implies “biological determinism.”
• Do not use the term “gay” because it normalizes and empowers people who are gay.
• Same-sex couples are “sterile” by design and cannot provide for children what an opposite-sex couple can.
• Marriage is a “pre-political” institution, and therefore not a civil right.
• Anti-gay advocates should “reach out and resist,” framing resistance to equality efforts as compassion for those who are gay.
• People in Sudan and Malaysia who have sex with farm animals demonstrate how marriage can deteriorate.
• “The end goal of gay activism is an assault on gender” — in other words, at the heart of sexual orientation discrimination is gender discrimination and a desire to maintain gender norms.
• Same-sex couples are “greedy” for trying to deprive a child of a mother or a father, and they will negatively impact how children are gendered.
• There are “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage” (although there is little factual support for most of these “reasons”).
• When religious organizations like Catholic Charities decide to stop providing services because of conflicts with laws recognizing same-sex couples (adoption, foster care, benefits, etc.), that is an “imposition of state theology.”
• The buzzword for describing opposite-sex couple marriages is “natural.”

Most of these points are not new or surprising, but they do offer understanding into how opponents of equality are framing their arguments and what rhetoric they find to be effective. The bloggers who attended have a lot more detail about their experience attending the symposium as well as other materials that were distributed there. It’s worth the full read.

John Smid, former Executive Director of Love in Action ex-gay ministries

Love in Action (LIA) is one of the largest and oldest ex-gay ministries in existence, founded in 1973, the same year the American Psychiatric Association decided that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. John Smid resigned as the group’s executive director in 2008, and since then has slowly been rethinking his understandings of sexuality and his beliefs about homosexuality. In a new blog post last week, Smid has shown just how far he has come, acknowledging his own homosexuality (despite his loving marriage to his wife) and the fact that sexual orientation cannot be changed. Here are some of the key confessions Smid makes:

• NO ONE CHANGES: “One cannot repent of something that is unchangeable… I also want to reiterate here that the transformation for the vast majority of homosexuals will not include a change of sexual orientation. Actually I’ve never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual.”
• NOT JUST BEHAVIOR: “I used to define homosexuality or heterosexuality in terms describing one’s behavior. I thought it made sense and through the years often wrote articles and talked from that perspective. Today, I understand why the gay community had such an issue with my writings. My perspective denied so many facets of the homosexual experience. I minimized a person’s life to just their sexuality but homosexuality is much more than sex.”
• GAYS CAN BE CHRISTIAN: “I hear story after story of men and women who accept themselves as being gay, in Christ, and finally find that life makes sense to them. Many are able to then nurture an authentic relationship with Christ because they are being honest and authentic with themselves and finally are able to accept His love unconditionally which changes the dynamic of their understanding of Him. Far too many homosexuals who are seeking Christ perceive that they cannot come close to Him if they remain a homosexual. In this mindset they search feverishly for change that will not come to them.”
• I AM HOMOSEXUAL: ”I would consider myself homosexual and yet in a marriage with a woman. My sexual desires, attractions and lifelong struggle with common factors relating to homosexuality are pretty much all in the classification of homosexual. I tried my hardest to create heterosexuality in my life but this also created a lot of shame, a sense of failure, and discouragement. Nothing I did seemed to change me into a heterosexual even though I was in a marriage that included heterosexual behavior. Very often when I am in situations with heterosexual men I clearly see that there are facets of our lives that are distinctively different as it relates to our sexuality, and other things as well.”

Smid is on his own journey, and will likely continue to work things out for himself. As Ex-Gay Watch points out, “There is a certain haziness to Smid’s new statements, and rather than taking an unambiguously pro-gay stance, he errs on the side of caution.” Nevertheless, his words are revelatory and speak to the harms of ex-gay therapy and how little evidence there is supporting their effectiveness. He joins a chorus of other former ex-gay leaders who have apologized for trying to shame gays and lesbians into rejecting their sexual orientations.

But Smid’s apology also helps connect the dots between the mythology of ex-gay therapy and anti-gay political positions. When individuals like Rick Santorum or Herman Cain (or anyone from this weekend’s Values Voter Summit) defend their opposition to LGBT equality by suggesting that sexuality is all about behavior or that it’s a choice, they are endorsing ex-gay therapy as the foundation of those positions. Cain said, “Show me the science,” but as Smid points out, people with anti-gay positions often aren’t willing or able to understand any of the facts that contradict their discriminatory positions:

I was completely unwilling to hear anything that didn’t fit my paradigm. I blocked out anyone’s life story or biblical teaching that didn’t match up with what I believed… Now that I am not submerged into one sided perspectives, I am open to studying and reading the scriptures for myself, I am finding so many rich truths that I wasn’t ever made aware of before.

Hopefully, testimonies like Smid’s will help others open their eyes to the experience of LGBT people beyond what they’ve convinced themselves is “moral” or “best for society.”

Audience members peppered Mitt Romney with questions about his opposition to same-sex marriage during a town hall in Hopkinton, New Hampshire on Monday, pressing the candidate on his position four separate times during the hour-long event. But Romney was unwilling or unable to make the case for why he would not recognize families with parents of the same gender, even as he spoke in a state that has permitted gays and lesbians to marry since 2009.

“I think the ideal setting to raise a child for a society like ours is where there is a man and a woman,” Romney initially responded to a question about why he thought marriage between a man and a woman was more valuable than that between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. “A society recognizes that the ideal setting for raising a child is when you have the benefit of two people working together and where one is male and one is female,” he added, but said he would support “partnership agreements” for people of the same gender. Romney dismissed a fourth question altogether, which came from a child who was raised by two dads. Watch a compilation:

Romney’s claim that opposite sex parents are the “ideal” way to raise children remains unsubstantiated, however. A range of studies, including research on gay and lesbian parents, have found that while it’s ideal for a child to be raised by two parents, the parents’ gender doesn’t cause radical differences. The American Psychological Association has also concluded that “beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents have no empirical foundation. Lesbian and heterosexual women have not been found to differ markedly in their approaches to child rearing.”