Our guest bloggers are Josh Garcia, intern forLGBT Progress, and Crosby Burns, Research Associate for LGBT Progress.

With Super Tuesday looming, the four remaining GOP candidates are scrambling for votes in Ohio, Oklahoma, and elsewhere with hopes of securing enough delegates to eventually win their party’s nomination and challenge President Obama this November.

Unfortunately, none of the Republican candidates stand for fair and equal treatment of LGBT Americans. In fact, these candidates have affirmed their support for policies that would all but guarantee discriminatory treatment of LGBT Americans in marriage, in the military, in employment, and elsewhere. For example, none of the remaining candidates support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would finally make discrimination against LGBT employees illegal.

With the clock ticking, the time has never been more important to understand the major differences between the GOP candidates on the many issues facing the LGBT community.

Candidate	Marriage Equality	Relationship recognition	DADT Repeal	ENDA	DOMA Repeal
Newt Gingrich Former Speaker of the House
Ron Paul Representative from Texas
Mitt Romney Former Governor of Massachusetts
Rick Santorum Former Junior Senator from Pennsylvania

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Tyron Garner and John Geddes Lawrence

In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that sodomy laws — which had come to target gay sex exclusively — were unconstitutional. But who was Lawrence? The mythos around the case has always portrayed a loving same-sex couple whose privacy was violated, but Dale Carpenter’s new book “Flagrant Conduct” reveals that the actual backstory is something completely different. Dahlia Lithwick explains in her profile of the book for The New Yorker that John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner weren’t even a couple and — despite their arrest — never even had sex:

The legal opportunity depended, however, upon persuading the defendants to go along with an unusual strategy. High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.

What’s compelling about this is that the principle of the case superseded the actual facts. It is true that Lawrence and Garner were charged with violating Texas’ sodomy law, but after that point, the case became entirely about what the law symbolized as opposed to how it was actually enforced. Cultural exposure to gays and lesbians had advanced enough by 2003 such that they could be seen for the lives they lead and the relationships they commit to, as opposed to just the immoral “ick” for the kind of sex they have. The true backstory may seem to undermine the validity of the case, but in reality it strengthens its significance. The decision in Lawrence v. Texas was not just a victory for gay rights, but an important milestone for the cultural acceptance of same-sex families in communities across our nation.

Last week, the pastor of a 15,000 member mega church in Houston, Texas is called on Mayor Annise Parker (D) to resign over her promotion of same-sex marriage. In an email to the openly gay lawmaker, Pastor Steve Riggle of Grace Community Church wrote, “Respectfully, if you cannot uphold the Texas constitution, then you should do the honorable thing and step down,” noting that the Constitution includes a a “voter-approved amendment banning same-sex marriage.”

Over the weekend, Riggle took his advocacy a step further, speaking out against Parker from the stand at Grace Community Church during Sunday services:

“Let all of those who believe that marriage ought to be defined and God defines it, as one man and one woman, stand up once and for all, declare we are on the side that God has declared,” said Pastor Riggle.

In the presence of 3,000 worshipers, the pastor discussed the letter he sent to Houston Mayor Annise Parker.

“A week ago Friday, I sent this letter to Mayor Parker. While we continue to pray for you, we will not support your actions or let you redefine what has always been the definition of marriage,” said Riggle. [...] “76 percent of the people of Texas and 72 percent of Harris County approved of what I respectfully asked you to do, as the Mayor of Houston, Texas, stand with the expressed will of the people and the constitution of Texas on definition of marriage,” said Riggle.

Watch it:

Parker — is one of the 90 mayors to support Freedom To Marry’s equality initiative — and has responded to the pastor by saying, ”I do my duty to uphold the state Constitution and the U.S. Constitution. I swore an oath to that. I take that oath very seriously, but I have my First Amendment rights to free speech.” “We all have the right to do that and I’m sorry that they [Riggle and his supporters] don’t understand the Constitution.”

Riggle is also asking Houston City Council “to declare where they stand on traditional marriage; he says the people of Houston have a right to know.”

Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery is once again making false claims about harm to children in an effort to oppose legal recognition of same-sex couples. In an op-ed for the Denver Post, he attacked legislation to create civil unions in Colorado, suggesting children will learn about “sexuality” and grow up in “intentionally motherless or fatherless” homes:

But the impact goes much further as it jeopardizes the rights of parents to have a say in what’s taught to their children in school — even as young as kindergarten — about sexuality and marriage. It endangers business owners who are sued for not photographing or renting facilities for same-sex ceremonies. Mostly, it impacts children who deserve every chance to be raised in a home with their own married mom and dad rather than the intentionally motherless or fatherless home created by same-sex unions.[...]

But we also join those whose voices are seldom heard, those of the children. As we have seen in California, the passage of civil union legislation will eventually threaten marriage. And if we say that marriage no longer means one mom and one dad, then we have denied children at least a chance to live in that special environment that gives them the best opportunity for success in life.

Conservative groups like FOTF use these two arguments often, but neither carries any significant weight. The first is that children might learn that gay people exist! Of course, plenty of schools now have same-sex families in their districts, so trying to argue that children shouldn’t learn about the existence of same-sex couples is tantamount to erasing some of their parents from the learning environment. Acknowledging some children’s parents is not a threat other children’s parents.

As for kids who may be “fatherless” or “motherless,” this argument is a common distortion of studies about single parents that rests entirely on archaic gender stereotypes. Studies show that the only unique obstacle faced by children of same-sex couples is anti-gay bullying that targets their families — prompted, of course, by the conservative groups trying to ostracize them.

It should come as no surprise that Minnery is blatantly lying about the impact of civil unions. He is the same Focus on the Family spokesperson who Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) eviscerated for his misrepresentation of similar studies during a Senate hearing on repealing the Defense of Marriage Act last July. Watch that moment again: