The National Organization for Marriage does not stand on any set of principles, but is guided solely by what it thinks will help defeat marriage equality for same-sex couples. In Washington, for example, NOM’s Brian Brown came out swinging against Starbucks for supporting the same-sex marriage bill:

BROWN: Americans should be able to drink a peaceful cup of coffee without worrying that a portion of the company’s profits is going to be used to push gay marriage without a vote from the people. This is a gratuitous leap into a hot button culture war issue; respect for diversity touted by Starbucks ought to include respecting the diverse views of all its customers and employees.

For Brown, “diversity” counts when it’s limited to only his views on marriage. Besides that, it’s a farce for NOM to act like it wants businesses to stay out of LGBT issues when it engages with them all the time. As Jeremy Hooper pointed out yesterday, NOM has repeatedly defended Chick-Fil-A for opposing LGBT rights. In fact, NOM now has a “Corporate Fairness Project” that bullies companies into staying affiliated with any employee or contractor who speaks out against marriage — regardless of how offensive their comments might be. Keep in mind too that NOM was on the front lines of the Proposition 8 fight, standing hand-in-hand with ProtectMarriage.com as it threatened businesses that were opposed to the discriminatory amendment.

It’s unclear why NOM targeted a Starbucks cup of coffee rather than a Nike shoe or an Internet search on Google or Microsoft Bing, as it would have to similarly boycott them all for supporting marriage equality in Washington. NOM’s duplicity is by no means surprising, but given the organization continues to commit millions to fighting marriage equality or retaliating against its supporters, its role in fights like Washington’s cannot be discounted.

Maryland Senator Jamie Raskin (D) highlighted the additional conscience protections included in Gov. Martin O’Malley’s (D) same-sex marriage bill while testifying before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee this afternoon. “The challenge with this legislation is to reconcile our fundamental values of equal rights for all people with religious pluralism and toleration,” Raskin explained, noting that O’Malley’s legislation allows the legislature to decide who can marry in city hall, “but the church gets to decide who gets married in the church hall.”

As a result, church sponsored and operated facilites or social service entities are not required to “lend any of its accommodations, programs, or services for the purpose of promoting a marriage it disapproves of for religious reasons.” Private individuals and businesses who provide public accommodations are a different matter, however. Responding to a question from Sen. Christopher B. Shank (R) about extending the bill’s conscience provisions to include event hall operators or motel owners who object to same-sex marriage, Raskin pointed out that existing laws already prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and warned that any further widening of the clause would erode existing protections:

RASKIN: If you set yourself out as a place of public accommodation, you’re open to the public. In any event, we’ve already driven over that bridge that you’re suggesting when we enacted legislation back in 2001 extending the public accommodation law to cover sexual orientation. So this nothing new. We already have laws that ban discrimination against gay people in the state and in a certain way we’re just extending that to the institution of marriage here. So it would be ironic if we used this legislation as an opportunity to roll back protections that gay people have to be served in restaurants, hotels, motels and other places of public accommodation.

Listen to the exchange:

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch (D) spoke out against the GOP’s effort to repeal the state’s same-sex marriage law in his State of the State address this afternoon and promised to veto any bill that strips residents of their “civil rights”:

LYNCH: New Hampshire has a long and proud tradition of fighting for the rights of all of our people and a tradition of leaving people alone to pursue their own hapiness. As Governor, I intended to uphold that century’s old tradition and I will stand firm against any legislation that will strip any of our citizens of their civil rights.

Watch it:

The New Hampshire legislature is preparing to vote on legislation that would undo marriage equality in the coming days, but some Republican lawmakers are hinting that they may not have the votes to override Lynch’s veto. Republicans — who hold veto-proof majorities in the both the House and Senate — remain split on whether the government should limit residents’ personal freedoms, the Concord Monitor reports, and the party leadership is hoping to avoid a prolonged debate on the issue.

LGBT activists in the United Arab Emirates are fighting back against the country’s reliance on ex-gay therapy and hormonal treatments to “cure” homosexuals with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for nations around the world to treat gay rights as human rights. The latest ex-gay push in the UAE appeared in the form of a six-minute video tutorial, titled “Be Yourself,” in which masculine men are shown transforming an effeminate man by teaching him masculine gestures, cutting his nails and hair, and lowering his voice. Watch the clip:

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual Rights UAE penned a letter “detailing the continued persecution facing the gay and lesbian community in the Gulf emirate,” in December. UAE law bans “obscenity and homosexual activity” and suspected gays and lesbians can be imprisoned for up to 14 years, receive the death sentence for “consensual sodomy” or be subject “to a medical procedure with no scientific basis, just for expressing their innate, human tendencies that are protected under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the letter notes. It goes on to quote from Clinton’s landmark speech on LGBT rights before the U.N.: “On December 6th, 2011, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton pointed out a fact that has been confirmed by a vast majority of the international, scientific community: ‘Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality.’ She further articulated how ‘gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world.’”

The group’s founder, Abdullah, has condemned the video, noting, “It angers me no end, but it also saddens me, this video would have been devastating if my 16-year-old self had watched it.” The video “brought flashbacks to me how on endless hot Friday afternoons I was forced to observe how men interact, or how they drink coffee by my father, so that I should emulate to make him proud,” he said.

Some 300 opponents of same-sex marriage rallied in front of the Maryland State House in Annapolis Monday night, calling on lawmakers to abandon legislative efforts to allow gays and lesbians to enter into civil marriages. The protest came on the eve of a Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing at which Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) is expected to make his case for marriage equality later this afternoon. O’Malley — who is taking an active role in the marriage debate this legislative session — has introduced a bill in the Maryland Senate that includes additional protections for religious institutions.

“Marriage it hold the families together, without marriages you have no families, you have no society then, it will just crumble,” one protester predicted, as demonstrators carried signs reading, “God said it’s wrong, we agree with God,” “God’s Way Is The Best Way,” and “I Believe in Adam and Eve!” They also seized on First Lady Katie O’Malley’s description of opponents of same-sex marriage as “cowards.” “Last I checked, victors were not cowards,” one speaker proclaimed, “Tell Kate we are not cowards!” Watch a local news report from WJZ:

Members of the clergy who favor same-sex marriage will hold a news conference in Annapolis today.

While issues like marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections were certainly on the agenda at this weekend’s National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change, keynote speakers highlighted conservatives’ efforts to obstruct the right to vote as one of the most pressing concerns for the LGBT community and its allies. In his address at the conference’s opening session Thursday night, NAACP president Ben Jealous emphasized that “our nation is in the midst of the greatest wave of voter suppression legislation since before the creation of the NAACP”:

JEALOUS: Supporters of voter suppression are responding to the growing diversity in this country, and the political power of this new population. They are afraid of the more inclusive America that the future holds.

And they know that coming after your right to vote is the first step to coming after so many of your other rights. That includes the right of workers to organize; the right of a woman to make decisions about her body; the right to walk down the street without fear of being harassed for papers; the right to stand alongside your loved one in his hospital room; the right to be yourself at work.

On Friday, Rea Carey, president of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, used her annual “State of the Movement” address to rally the LGBT community toward fighting the voter suppression efforts sweeping the nation. Calling voting an act of “resistance and insistence,” she urged the conference and movement at large to “occupy the vote”:

CAREY: Our opposition — those who do not believe in our full humanity or equality are on the attack. But, mobilizing the right-wing base to come out and vote on marriage isn’t actually their trump card anymore — it’s much deeper than that.

It’s the very ability to cast a vote. [...]

Having lost ground on LGBT and racial justice and equality over the last 40 years, and not having enough respect for our democracy to accept it, the right is now doing all it can to complicate the rules to register, get a ballot, vote early — you name it, they’ll do it, if it disenfranchises certain types of voters.

And so we are called to lead and to protect access to voting. This is in our self-interest and in the interest of our allies! We are people of color, we are students, we are transgender.

In 2012, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Maine are already preparing for referendums on the issue of same-sex marriage, and Washington and New Jersey could join them. Conservatives are also attempting to use ballot initiatives to attack California’s law mandating that school curricula be LGBT-inclusive. The right of LGBT citizens and their allies to vote is crucial to advancing equality, and voter ID laws present a serious threat to that goal.

The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) issued a statement last week on “Sexual Orientation Change” that attempts to downplay the poor success rates and negative PR surrounding ex-gay therapy — not to mention the harmful impact it has on clients. Without any empirical research to support its conclusions, NARTH advocates redefining the very standard of “change” from an absolute category to a client-defined goalpost on a supposed continuum of change:

NARTH affirms that some individuals who seek care for unwanted same-sex attractions do report categorical change of sexual orientation. Moreover, NARTH acknowledges that others have reported no change. However, the experience of NARTH clinicians suggests that the majority of individuals who report unwanted same-sex attractions and pursue psychological care will be best served by conceptualizing change as occurring on a continuum, with many being able to achieve sustained shifts in the direction and intensity of their sexual attractions, fantasy, and arousal that they consider to be satisfying and meaningful. NARTH believes that a profound disservice is done to those with unwanted same-sex attractions by characterizing such shifts in sexual attractions as a denial of their authentic (and gay) personhood or a change in identity labeling alone.

In other words, NARTH wants to claim that clients have successfully changed their sexual orientation so long as they believe that they are actually changing. NARTH tries to distinguish itself as a psychological organization that stands apart from religious ex-gay ministries, but here it is literally admitting that it should be applauded for creating a placebo effect — that clients should be encouraged to pursue ex-gay therapy in spite of the expected lack of results.

The language of “change” is at the heart of NARTH’s work and messaging. Its mission statement acknowledges a “right of all individuals to choose their own destiny.” In position statements, NARTH suggests “the right to seek therapy to change one’s sexual adaptation should be considered self-evident and inalienable,” encourages schools to allow “discussion about those who have chosen to change their orientation,” and boasts that there are “numerous examples exist of people who have successfully modified their sexual behavior, identity, and arousal or fantasies.” NARTH also offers that change is a “worthy” goal and that “significant numbers” have experienced “substantial healing.” In 2004, Robert Perloff, a former president of the American Psychological Association, addressed the annual NARTH conference, proclaiming, “The individual has the right to choose whether he or she wishes to become straight. It is his or her choice, not that of an ideologically driven interest group.” The implied standard has always been that a person can change from one sexual orientation to another.

Like all proponents of ex-gay therapy, NARTH thinks it’s more important to defend those who have unwanted same-sex attractions than to challenge the internalized homophobia that troubles its members’ potential clients. And like almost all proponents of ex-gay therapy, NARTH continues to profit so long as individuals are susceptible to anti-gay stigma and the hope of changing their sexual orientation. By lowering its standard of “change” to whatever clients are willing to believe is “change,” this group of “psychologists” has admitted that the service they offer produces no results whatsoever.

Chris Christie responded to the growing outrage over his claims last week that New Jersey residents should decide whether gay and lesbian people should be allowed to marry by admitting that public opinion may not be receptive to extending civil liberties to minorities. Christie took particular umbrage at African American leaders who condemned his suggestion that “people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.” Here are his comments from this morning via Andy Towle:

“Political members of the state legislature comparing me to Lester Maddox and George Wallace shows how desperate the Democrats are,” Christie said…. “The question was raised to me by the mayor of Asbury Park,” Christie recalled. “I think afterwards they all understood and affirmed to me that I was not being critical of the Civil Rights movement. They knew exactly what I meant, which is that the political climate didn’t give them a chance for a referendum.” [...]

Christie said “numnuts like (Assemblyman) Reed Gusciora should be ashamed of themselves” for comparing him to Maddox and Wallace.