Rick Perry tried to reinvigorate his flailing presidential campaign during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this afternoon, as he doubled down on his anti-gay messaging and promised to “absolutely” prohibit gays and lesbians from serving in the armed forces. The Texas governor stood by his controversial Iowa ad, which accuses President Obama of denying children the right to “openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school,” telling Blitzer, “you can’t even have a Christmas party, you can’t even say a prayer in school.”

He also explained that organizations should have the “choice” of discriminating against LGBT people while receiving federal dollars “if those dollars are being used in an appropriate way,” before launching into his support for the now defunct Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy:

BLITZER: If you were president would you go back and not allow gays to serve openly in the United States military?

PERRY: Absolutely. I think Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell worked fine. Listen, I wore the uniform….and this president to use the military, and he’s used the military twice, Wolf and both times, I think to get support from his base. But particularly on the gays in the military issue, he made the decision that he was going to respond to his base by pushing through and pushing through Congress when he had the votes to openly serve as gay members of the military. I didn’t agree with that. We have two wars going on, unit cohesiveness, the problems that that can cause, those are real.

BLITZER: But military commanders tell me, in the past few months since the policy has changed, they’ve had no problems. Including the commandant of the Marine Corps, who was originally opposed .

PERRY: Well, I’m just telling you the members of the military I talked to, when this was being talked about, I didn’t talk to anyone who was for it…

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Conservatives are not happy about the Obama administration’s new effort to promote LGBT freedom across the globe, trumpeted by State Sec. Hillary Clinton in an historic speech to the United Nations yesterday. Most opponents of the new plan have couched their comments in the assumption that homosexuality is wrong and not something we should “export,” directly contradicting Clinton’s point that “being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality.” Here’s a round-up of the various responses from the Religious Right:

• Rick Perry: “This is just the most recent example of an administration at war with people of faith in this country. Investing tax dollars promoting a lifestyle many Americas of faith find so deeply objectionable is wrong. President Obama has again mistaken America’s tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles.”
• Rick Santorum: “Obviously the administration is promoting their particular agenda in this country, and now they feel its their obligation to promote those values not just in the military, not just in our society, but now around the world with taxpayer dollars.”
• Matt Barber (Liberty Counsel): “[President Obama] feels compelled to export American culture’s decline in morality, and export that immorality to other nations that are trying to adhere to traditional principles relative to human sexuality.”
• Peter LaBarbera (American For Truth About Homosexuality): “Reading Hillary’s UN #gay rights speech. The arrogance of modern liberalism is astounding: redefining sin as a *human right.*“
• Pat Robertson (The 700 Club): “Isn’t it appalling that the United States of America would try to force the acceptance of homosexuality on other nations but at the same time we would not force them to take care of their religious minorities and they would permit discrimination and persecution of Christians?”
• Vic Eliason (Voice of Christian Youth America): “The inmates have taken over the asylum.”
• Mat Staver (Liberty Counsel): “[The Obama administration] is forcing foreign countries to fund and liberalize… the radical sexual anarchist agenda.”
• Janet Mefferd (radio personality): “Other than the fact that you have African countries that have policies like Nigeria, criminalizing homosexuality, are they not a sovereign nation? Can’t they make up their own minds about these things? If they want to pass a law we’re going to play bully over this issue?”

No one has responded as negatively as the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg, however, who has already spoken out multiple times against the new policy in the 24 hours since it was rolled out. After condemning President Obama for promoting the “radical ideology of the sexual revolution,” Sprigg unloaded all of his anti-gay vitriol on Christian Broadcast News:

These type of human rights and civil rights protections are usually granted for characteristics that are inborn, involuntary — you can’t choose them, immutable — you can’t change them, and innocuous — they do no harm to anyone. All of those things are true of race and sex. None of them is true of the choice to engage in homosexual conduct.

In many African countries, such as Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria, homophobia is proliferated through Catholic or Protestant Christian groups, often with American ties. They promote the insidious lies Sprigg mentioned and spread fears that homosexuality will literally destroy society. The Obama administration’s new effort to end persecution abroad is a battle to fight on our own shores as much as on theirs.

Michele Bachmann condemned Congress on Glenn Beck’s web show last night for moving to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which outlaws both sodomy and sex with animals. The repeal measure is part of the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, which passed last week.

Beck played a clip of WorldNetDaily’s Les Kinsolving asking White House Press Secretary Jay Carney about the provision yesterday and Bachmann suggested that the policy change could encourage children to try bestiality:

BACHMANN: It’s absolutely abhorrent, reprehensible and you think, this is the kind of thing parents try to keep from their children because parents want to have their children enjoy innocence. Children need that latency period, they need innocence and your own government legalizes this? … Are we really going to say ho hum and laugh and go back to sleep? There’s got to be something we stand for. [...]

So the big question is, is there anything that’s wrong? That’s my question. If that’s not wrong, Glenn what’s wrong? Is there anything that’s wrong? Then you have a very serious problem on your hands.

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A new report from the Williams Institute shows that just one year of marriage equality in Iowa had great financial benefit for the state. In the 12 months after the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage in April 2009, wedding arrangements and tourism by same-sex couples and their guests generated between $12 million and $13 million in spending, resulting in up to $930,000 in new state and local tax revenues.

About 59 percent of the same-sex couples who married in that first year were from outside Iowa, but mostly from neighboring states in the Midwest. Because the state implements a three-day waiting period to receive a marriage license, these couples may have contributed even greater boosts through tourism if they spent those days in Iowa. With the available data, the authors of the report estimate that marriage equality helped create between 59 and 70 new jobs in the travel industry.

Yesterday, the Obama administration announced a landmark full government strategy for advancing equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in its foreign policy and called on nations around the world to recognize that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.” The president issued a new directive ordering “all agencies engaged abroad to ensure that U.S. diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a 30 minute speech in Geneva, in which she announced a new $3 million Global Fund to support the work of civil society organizations working for equality around the world.

But you would have likely missed this story watching the nightly network news programs, CNN or Fox News, a ThinkProgress analysis of the media coverage finds. While MSNBC devoted four separate segments to the administration’s announcement — with ample coverage from Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell — and Fox News even included the story in Bret Baier’s Special Report, CNN, ABC World News, and the CBS Evening News ignored it entirely:

Fortunately, the news was extensively covered online and in the alternative press.