Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH)

WASHINGTON, DC — Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), best known as the “boring” choice atop Mitt Romney’s vice presidential list, told ThinkProgress today that he doesn’t believe it should be illegal to fire someone for being gay because doing so would make businesses less “comfortable.”

In an interview at the Faith & Freedom Conference, Portman explained why he opposes the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which would ban firing someone because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity. “What I’m concerned about in Paycheck Fairness and other legislation like that is the fact that it will spawn a lot of litigation the way the legislation is written,” the Ohio Senator said. He worried that the legislation “would make it more difficult for employers to feel comfortable.”

KEYES: The Senate’s going to be taking up the Employee Non-Discrimination Act. Do you think that it ought to be illegal to fire someone for being gay in the United States?

PORTMAN: I don’t believe in discrimination…

KEYES: But whether or not it should be legal.

PORTMAN: What I’m concerned about in Paycheck Fairness and other legislation like that is the fact that it will spawn a lot of litigation the way the legislation is written. So you don’t want it to be a boon to lawyers, you want it to actually help people. But no one should discriminate.

KEYES: So you’re worried that people might actually take up claims that they were discriminated against?

PORTMAN: [...] A lot of them would create a lot of legal rights of action that would make it more difficult for employers to feel comfortable, to be able to hire, and to keep this economy moving. So you have to be careful how you do it.

Watch it:

Portman’s principal objection to making it illegal to fire someone for being gay, in other words, is that people who are discriminated against might have the gall to take legal action.

Portman was correct about one thing: if Congress were to finally make it illegal to fire someone because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity, a lot of lawsuits could ensue. That’s only a bad thing if one wants to preserve businesses’ ability to discriminate. Lawsuits are the sole mechanism by which most laws are enforced in this country. Without lawsuits, the South would still be segregated, ten year-olds would still work in mines, and there would be no minimum wage. Research shows that 42 percent of LGB workers and 90 percent of transgender workers have experienced workplace discrimination. Unless people can take action in court, Portman’s feel-good belief that “no one should discriminate” is meaningless.

Over 70 percent of Americans support legislation protecting LGBT people from workplace discrimination, and 9 in 10 mistakenly believe that a federal law doing so already exists. Unfortunately, the frontrunner to be the Republican vice presidential nominee is not among them.

Slate's Will Saletan

Slate magazine invited Mark Regnerus to write a guest column about his biased, flawed paper about gay parenting, and Slate contributor Will Saletan humored the study without doing much to critique its obviously fraudulent methodology. Today, Saletan continued to defend the study, suggesting that there is a “liberal war on science” and that individuals should “trust science” and “embrace” this paper for what insights it supposedly offers about family stability. By completely disregarding concerns that LGBT groups expressed, Saletan duplicitiously demonstrated that he cares more about the political implications of the faulty paper than any high-minded regard for science that he might claim. And though he managed to finally point out some mistakes that Regnerus made, he still argued that the study had substance worth considering:

Shifting the conversation from orientation to stability doesn’t end the debate. But it does break the logjam. It frees us from dissent-silencing appeals to authority, such as the Bible or policy statements from the American Psychological Association. It opens social conservatives to the possibility of accepting gay marriage, since, as Regnerus points out, “whether some relationship arrangements are more systematically prone to disorganization than others” is an “empirically testable question.” By the same token, it challenges homosexuals to deliver. The Regnerus study shows how wretchedly unstable the households of most gay parents were in the years when gay sex and gay marriage were illegal. We have a chance now to do better. Don’t let the experiment fail.

That’s why we should take this study seriously. It tells both sides, including its author and its funders, difficult truths they need to hear. Family stability matters. And when same-sex couples are permitted, encouraged, and determined to provide that stability, kids do better. The left’s enlightenment about sexual orientation can be married to the right’s wisdom about family values. It won’t be easy. But it’s worth the effort.

Saletan comes off as overly eager to admit he’s wrong without admitting he’s wrong, and in the process he managed to prove just how irrelevant the study is. As he even admitted, only ten respondents indicated that they had lived consistently with same-sex parents for 13 or more of their first 18 years, so to suggest that this paper has anything legitimate to say about same-sex parenting is still a gross misreading. It absolutely requires buying into Regnerus’ conflation of “gay or lesbian parent” with “committed same-sex parents.” If Saletan really cares about “trusting science,” he can’t then frame his analysis around implications for gay parents when the study has none to offer.

Now, the observation that stability is good and instability is bad is fine, but to credit Regnerus’ paper with this conclusion is an overreach. If the purpose of this study was to identify the impact of broken families on youth, then why did Regnerus make it about gay and lesbian parents? In fact, he made the broadest generalization of the data possible in a specific attempt to draw conclusions about gay and lesbian parents, and it is those conclusions he has been discussing in every media appearance. Stability may be an “empirically testable question,” but it’s not the one Regnerus asked. Just because Saletan can contort the data to draw his own conclusions doesn’t make the study good science — it merely demonstrates his ability to spin.

Truth Wins Out’s Wayne Besen slammed Saletan today as a “conservative apologist posing as a liberal” with a “self-serving and dishonest writing style.” Saletan seems to believe he’s carved out some happy middle position that can appease both sides of the debate, but in doing so he’s managed to say nothing substantive at all.

Janice Daniels, mayor of Troy, Michigan, has made a national name for herself thanks to her anti-gay rhetoric — so much so that voters are threatening to recall her. A month after her election last fall, it was discovered she had made comments on Facebook expressing her disdain for New York “now that queers can get married there.” Then, in January, a group of high school students accused her of calling homosexuality a “mental disease” at an open forum. Though she denied it, the recording confirmed that she wanted to bring in psychiatrists who would say “the homosexual lifestyle is dangerous.” Yesterday morning, she doubled down on this rhetoric in a conversation with morning radio host Charlie Langton, comparing the dangers of “the homosexual lifestyle” to the dangers of “the smoking lifestyle”:

DANIELS: I said one thing in a business meeting. I said that I would bring a doctor in to tell our high school students that the gay lifestyle is dangerous…. just the same as I could  find a doctor that would come in and talk about the dangers of the smoking lifestyle. I could find someone who talks about the dangers of running down Big Beaver Road — it’s a wonderful form of exercise but you could get hit by a car.

Listen to the full interview:

Last year, Iowa’s The FAMiLY LEADER infamously linked to a now-defunct site called “Second Hand Effects” that described homosexuality as a public health crisis akin to smoking.

Organizers of Daniels’ recall submitted 9,300 signatures, well over the 7,985 that were necessary to force the vote. Though her’ anti-gay comments are not the only motivation for the recall effort, they have certainly received the most public attention and outcry.

A coalition of diverse religious groups has come together to support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, including African American Ministers in Action, the Anti-Defamation League, The Episcopal Church, Hindu American Foundation, and Muslims for Progressive Values. In their letter to senators, they describe how protecting LGBT people from discrimination is crucial to their faith:

Many of our sacred texts speak to the importance and sacred nature of work – an opportunity to be co-creators with God – and demand in the strongest possible terms the protection of all workers as a matter of justice. Our faith leaders and congregations grapple with the difficulties of lost jobs every day, particularly in these difficult economic times. It is indefensible that, while sharing every American’s concerns about the health of our economy, LGBT workers must also fear job security because of prejudice.

At the same time, as religious denominations and faith groups, we deeply value our guarantee to the freedoms of faith and conscience under the First Amendment. ENDA broadly exempts from its scope any religious organization, thereby ensuring that religious institutions will not be compelled to violate the religious precepts on which they are founded, whether or not we may agree with those precepts. In so doing, ENDA respects the protections for religious institutions afforded by the First Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while ensuring that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are protected from baseless discrimination in the workplace.

At Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Craig Parshall of the National Religious Broadcasters Association testified that ENDA’s religious exemptions do not go far enough, though they already protect religious organizations and religious-run schools. He argued that any business owner should be free to discriminate based on their religious beliefs, an exemption so broad that ENDA would be practically unenforceable. These groups demonstrate that there are significant religious arguments to be made in favor of LGBT equality and protection from discrimination.

Italian researchers have made a new discovery that solidifies the understand that homosexuality — at least in men — has a strong genetic component. Though this study does not identify a specific gay gene, which probably does not exist, it does demonstrate what role genetics play.

Andrea Camperio Ciani at the University of Padova discovered that the mothers and maternal aunts of gay men tend to have significantly more offspring than those of straight men. Tthere seems to be at least one gene on the X chromosome that creates a trade-off in men and women. The men turn out gay (and hypothetically less likely to reproduce), but the women’s fecundity increases, making them more likely to have more offspring. In a sense, the gene makes men more attracted to men, but the women more attractive to men. Not only are they more fertile and have less complications during pregnancy, but these women are also more extroverted and have few family problems and social anxieties.

This is called the “balancing selection hypothesis,” and it effectively demonstrates how male homosexuality —as documented not only in humans but hundreds of species — does not actually contradict expectations that evolution favors reproduction. Still, homosexuality is clearly not determined by a single factor. Studies have shown, for example, that exposure to certain levels of hormones in the womb can play a role in sexuality. Twin studies also suggest other genetic components, even in women. But this research may help explain why female sexuality tends to be more fluid while men’s tends to be more fixed; this “trade-off” gene may just not be playing the same role.

Scientists may never fully identity what complex combination of factors determines sexuality, but there is still plenty of evidence to conclude that it is natural and healthy part of human diversity. With each new discovery about the nature of homosexuality, discrimination against people for being gay becomes more repugnantly indefensible.