For the past few months, Vanderbilt University has faced strong pushback from Christian student groups over its policy requiring all on-campus organizations to abide by the university’s non-discrimination statement, which includes sexual orientation protections. The groups claim that by being forced to allow gay students to participate and run for officer positions, they themselves are being discriminated against for their faith. The university has stood by its policy, arguing that because all students pay fees, all students should have equal access to campus resources.

This week, the issue escalated as the Tennessee legislature passed a bill threatening to cut state funding to any university that does not allow its religious student clubs to discriminate according to their beliefs. Though he does not agree with Vanderbilt’s policy, Gov. Bill Haslam (R) has committed to vetoing the bill — his first veto in office — because he considers it government overreach:

HASLAM: It is counter-intuitive to make campus organizations open their membership and leadership positions to anyone and everyone, even when potential members philosophically disagree with the core values and beliefs of the organization. Although I disagree with Vanderbilt’s policy, as someone who strongly believes in limited government, I think it is inappropriate for government to mandate the policies of a private institution.

Despite the veto, the debate will surely rage on. A nation-wide group known as the Christian Legal Society (which also has a Vanderbilt chapter) took a similar fight at a public college all the way to the Supreme Court a few years ago and lost. In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the Court found that “all-comers” policies were viewpoint neutral, and thus are no more unfair to Christian groups than any other student groups.

Despite the broad support they’ve received from the religious right, the Christian groups’ arguments generally lack merit. They allege that their organizations could somehow be infiltrated by antagonistic individuals attempting to take over the leadership, but not only has this never happened, but there’s also nothing keeping members from splintering off and forming a new group. They also argue that the exception that allows fraternities and sororities to discriminate based on sex is unfair, but of course this ignores the reality that Greek organizations are often intentionally single-sex because their members live together. Ultimately, these tactics represent a false victimization, an attempt by conservative groups to use campus resources to discriminate against other students. Thankfully, the state will not have the opportunity to compromise the university’s principles.

In an MSNBC interview this morning, Chuck Todd asked Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) about the apparently successful efforts by anti-gay extremists to force openly gay foreign policy spokesperson Richard Grenell out of the Romney presidential campaign.

Jindal said he had no problem having openly gay staffers and claimed that qualifications should be the only consideration in state employment decisions. But that position is at odds with his 2008 action ending non-discrimination protections for gay and lesbian state employees:

TODD: There’s been this controversy inside the Romney campaign about Ric Grenell feeling as if he had to resign because he didn’t feel comfortable being openly gay and the controversy that was causing with some social conservatives. Do you have any problems having openly gay staffers?

JINDAL: No. I meant that’s obviously not something we ask folks. Look, we want the most qualified people to work with us on our team and to move our state forward.

Watch the video:

Putting aside the fact that his desire to move Louisiana “forward” would seem highly offensive to right-wingers who believe that term both Marxist and Nazi — and his implied Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell-style approach to the issue — Jindal makes the important point that employees should be judged not on their sexual orientation, but on their ability to get the job done.

However, during his first year as governor in 2008, Jindal opted not to renew the non-discrimination executive order put in place by his Democratic predecessor, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. Her order had banned employment discrimination and harassment of state government employees on the basis of their sexual orientation. Jindal said he didn’t “think it is necessary to create additional special categories or special rights,” so he rescinded Blanco’s already existing categories protecting nothing more than the right he today seemed to endorse.

Perhaps it’s time for Jindal to revisit his 2008 decision — and for Romney to re-evaluate this campaign’s commitment to inclusion.

Wall Street executives stressed the importance of equal rights for gays and lesbians in the workplace during the “Out on the Street” LGBT Leadership Conference Wednesday and insisted that discriminatory laws undermined recruitment. “[Same-sex marriage] was important for our recruiting, for being able to move people around the world, for a number of business reasons, and then of course, last but not least, how could you not be on the side of what to me seems like a basic civil rights movement?” Lloyd C. Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs Group explained. He added that the company’s inclusive policy has come at a cost:

“It’s not without a price,” Blankfein reportedly told a group of Wall Street gay activists, referring to the investment bank’s embrace of same-sex marriage. “There was some adverse reaction by someone … They didn’t want to continue a relationship that they had with us in money management.”

Blankfein did not name the client but reportedly told the group, “if you heard the name it wouldn’t surprise you.”

Other executives generally agreed with Blankfein’s tone. “We gear our whole diversity and inclusion efforts so that you can come in, be yourself and be successful,” Bank of America CEO Brian T. Moynihan added. “You can come in, be yourself, be successful, be all you want to be,” he said.

Earlier this year, the Human Rights Campaign stirred controversy and spared controversy for awarding Goldman Sachs with its 2011 Workplace Equality Innovation Award.

When presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s openly gay foreign policy spokesman resigned under pressure from right-wing anti-gay groups, the campaign sought to minimize the perceived damage by noting that Richard Grenell had not actually started yet on the job.

When a CNN anchor asked campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom about Grenell, the top aide prefaced his remarks by saying: “First let me correct you. He wasn’t two weeks on the job. He was scheduled to start on May 1.” Other Romney-friendly media, vaguely sourcing the campaign, addressed Grenell’s departure the same way, implying that he left the job before he’d started it. When the Washington Post reported that Grenell was “kept under wraps,” Washington Examiner’s Byron York pushed back:

But Romney campaign officials say strongly that they did not keep Grenell under wraps or in any other way discourage him from taking the job. First, they point out that at the time (last week) in which Grenell was supposedly being held back, he was not yet an employee of the Romney campaign. Like a number of other new hires, officials say, Grenell was getting ready to move to Boston to begin work May 1. Romney officials fully anticipated he would begin his public role as spokesman then.

The only problem? Grenell could well have been set to officially become an employee of the Romney campaign on May 1, but he’d already started working for the team.

As Andrew Sullivan reported last night and the New York Times later confirmed, Grenell helped organize a Romney campaign conference call to pre-empt Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy speech last week. Sullivan reported that after Grenell’s voice was not heard on the April 26 call, which he’d helped set up, people started to ask questions:

Some even called and questioned him afterwards as to why he was absent. He wasn’t absent. He was simply muzzled. For a job where you are supposed to maintain good relations with reporters, being silenced on a key conference call on your area of expertise is pretty damaging. Especially when you helped set it up.

Sources close to Grenell say that he was specifically told by those high up in the Romney campaign to stay silent on the call, even while he was on it. And this was not the only time he had been instructed to shut up.

The Times added information to Sullivan’s story, also noting that the call was the “biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team”:

It turned out [Grenell] was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

It’s no wonder Grenell felt the need to resign from the campaign. The newly revealed information only bolsters his reasons: the campaign was clearly seeking to mislead the media to downplay Grenell’s departure. “It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” an anonymous Republican told the Times. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.” If Romney campaign can’t stand up to a bigoted special interest on personnel issues — for what they clearly thought was the best man for the job — how could a Romney administration be expected to make the politically tough decisions needed to successfully govern the country?

Jodie Brunstetter’s comments that the “Caucasian” race would benefit from North Carolina’s Amendment 1 initiative — a constitutional measure prohibiting same-sex marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnerships — came in an attempt to persuade another white woman to support the effort, but instead convinced two African American voters to oppose it, ThinkProgress has learned.

Brunstetter is the wife of North Carolina Sen. Peter Brunstetter (R), who voted in favor of the measure.

“She said the white race is diminishing and I asked her why that alarmed her and that’s when she said, you know, that white people had founded this country. She of course made no mention of the fact that there were people already here,” Kate Maloy, the woman to whom Brunstetter made the remarks, said in a phone interview this morning.

Maloy claims she came to the polls to urge voters to oppose the measure, but soon found herself in a 30 minute conversation with the senator’s wife, who was passing out flyers in favor of the amendment. “It just became clear to me that she couldn’t hear anything I said. She wasn’t willing to consider one word out of my mouth,” Maloy said. Brunstetter mentioned race half way through the discussion. “She said the white race is diminishing and I asked her why that alarmed her and that’s when she said, you know, that ‘white people had founded this country.’”

Brunstetter made her argument within earshot of an African American poll worker. “He was standing there with his back to us. Now, I was kind of watching him out of the corner of my eye because, you know when she started talking about the Caucasian race diminishing, I saw his whole body, he threw his head back and his mouth came open and he could not believe what he was hearing,” Maloy said and noted — with some degree of satisfaction — that Brunstetter’s remarks convinced two African American women to oppose the measure:

MALOY: I had been having a real intense conversation with these two women, both of whom were black, and both of whom were voting for the amendment and both of whom really changed their mind. And not only that, but they were going to go talk to a whole lot of people. Once they heard how many people would be harmed by this and what the spirit of the amendment is.

“I was kind of giving her an opportunity to say what she really believed. I wasn’t pushing anything,” Maloy added. “The fact that she did say this to me — maybe she thought all white people believed this.”

Early voting has already begun in the state and will continue until May 8. Brunstetter admits to using the word “Caucasian,” but denies that she was talking about race. The NAACP of North Carolina has issued a statement condemning her remarks.

The National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People’s North Carolina State Conference (NC NAACP) is condemning Jodie Brunstetter, the wife of a prominent North Carolina state senator and supporter of Amendment 1, who allegedly claimed earlier this week that her husband advocated for the measure to protect the “Caucasian” race. Brunstetter apparently made the comments to another white woman while handing out literature in support of the provision to prohibit same-sex marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnerships in the state constitution.

“The alleged comments by the supporter of Amendment One would be less concerning if they did not fit as a piece of the cynical puzzle of race-based political agendas and money found in the forces and rationales behind the Discriminatory Amendment,” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, president of the organization, said in a press release. He also connected Brunstetter’s remarks to the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) strategy of dividing the African American community on the marriage issue:

The reality is that the extreme right wing forces behind this amendment are the same people waging a public policy campaign against African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, the poor and other minorities. Therefore, the alleged comments and the well-documented rationale represented in them are not surprising. They only serve to help connect the dots between a regressive, race-based strategy to pass Amendment One and the larger attack on the rights of minorities for the purpose of maintaining power in the hands of the few.

Local news stations are also picking up on the story, noting that Brunstetter and her husband, Sen. Peter Brunstetter, are denying the allegation. Watch the NBC 17 report:

Mitt Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom responded to the resignation of the campaign’s openly gay foreign policy spokesperson Richard Grenell during an appearance on CNN Wednesday night, but failed to harshly criticize conservative right wing activists who had derided the aide as a “homosexual activist” and may have hounded him out of his position.

Instead, in a response that closely resembled the GOP’s reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” controversy, Fehrnstrom found false equivalency between “voices of intolerance” in both political parties and fell short of crisply defending gay Republicans from the claim that they’ll impose a “homosexual agenda” that is contrary to “family values”:

ERIN BURNETT (CNN HOST): He said, “my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyperpartisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign.” Obviously it sounds there, reading between the lines, that the focus on his personal decisions, on perhaps his sexuality, was why he chose to go. Maybe not because it was happening in your campaign, but it was happening by others in the Republican party?

FEHRNSTROM: Yeah, and that’s disappointing. Wherever there are voices of intolerance within the party or the Democratic party for that matter, it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from, it’s disappointing. And the governor has taken the opportunity in the past to denounce those voices of intolerance…. [W]e do not take into consideration non-factors like race or ethnicity or sexual orientation. We look for the best possible people to do the job.

Watch it:

Romney failure to take the opportunity to denounce social conservative critics in the aftermath of Grenell’s appointment and his decision to keep the spokesperson under wraps during the anniversary of the Bin Laden capture, likely contributed to his decision to resign. As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin reported, Grenell was upset that there was no public statement of support for him “by the campaign and no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters.” An aide confirmed the campaign’s resistance to engage with conservatives to the New York Times. “It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” one Republican adviser said. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.”

That silence also allowed social conservatives to take a victory lap following the resignation. The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer — who had led the charge against Grenell’s appointment, attacking him for being a “homosexual activist” whose behavior is “offensive to God” — declared a “huge win” and noted, “There is no way in the world that Mitt Romney is going to put a homosexual activist in any position of importance in his campaign.”