When the clock strikes midnight tonight, it will mark more than simply the start of a new year for some couples in Maryland — it’s also when Maryland’s new marriage equality law officially takes effect. Some same-sex weddings are already planned for the first moments of 2013.

Since New Year’s Day is a government holiday, courthouses across Maryland are closed. But that didn’t stop Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) from taking steps to ensure that same-sex couples won’t have to wait any longer for marriage equality. Rawlings-Blake will open Baltimore’s city hall tonight to allow at least seven same-sex couples to get married, and the mayor plans to serve as an official witness for the wedding ceremonies:

“New Years Day will have a new meaning for the hundreds — if not thousands — of couples who will finally have the right to marry the person they love,” said Mayor Rawlings-Blake.

“It is a remarkable achievement for Maryland, and we are excited to open City Hall to host some of the first wedding ceremonies in our great state. Newly married couples will stand before their friends and family to profess their love and commitment to each other. This is what we worked for, and I am looking forward to take part in this historic and jubilant day.”

The first couple to be married at City Hall will be a longtime aide to the mayor and his partner of 35 years. And even though the courthouses in other Maryland cities may not be open, the early marriage licenses that some same-sex couples in the state were able to begin applying for in December will become official at midnight tonight.

After sweeping LGBT victories in November expanded marriage equality across several states, same-sex couples also began getting married in Washington earlier this month and in Maine earlier this week.

Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY)

The Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that remains one of the biggest obstacles to marriage equality today, has lost another supporter, this time a GOPer swept into Congress in the Tea Party wave of 2010.

Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) announced in a statement late last week that he has signed onto the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill to repeal DOMA. Since its passage in 1996, DOMA has defined marriage on a federal level as between one man and one woman, purposefully excluding gay and lesbian couples. DOMA also denies gay people who have legally wed in their states countless federal benefits and protections, such as Social Security survivor benefits if one partner dies.

However, the 16-year-old discriminatory law could be in its waning days. Though President Bill Clinton had signed the law, most Democrats now oppose it, and are gaining momentum in bringing Republicans on board. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) already opposes DOMA, and now Hanna becomes the 2nd GOPer to pull his support, as he detailed in an announcement Friday:

“New York State allows all its citizens the freedom to marry the person they love,” he said. “Under the Tenth Amendment, the federal government has a Constitutional responsibility to respect New York’s right to set its own laws. It’s my job to see that it does.

“It is right to extend equal protection under federal law to all couples who are legally married without infringing upon religious freedom and beliefs,” Hanna continued. “This legislation does not tell states who can be married or who must be treated as married, nor does it require any religious institution to violate their own convictions.

“I respect the deeply held beliefs on both sides of this issue,” he said. “The simple fact remains that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure all legally married couples are treated equally under federal law – and this bill would achieve that proper standard.”

An increasing number of Republicans are coming out in favor of equality. Perhaps most surprising is Newt Gingrich, a man who as Speaker in 1996 ushered in passage of DOMA, but reversed course last week and argued that Republicans should accept marriage equality. “The momentum is clearly now in the direction in finding some way to … accommodate and deal with reality,” said Gingrich.

Still, the entire debate in Congress over DOMA may be academic if the Supreme Court strikes it down next year. It will hear a challenge to DOMA in the first quarter of 2013 and issue a ruling in June.

At his annual Christmas speech to the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI called same-sex marriage a “manipulation of nature” to be deplored and an attack on the “essence of the human creature.”

It was the second time this week that Benedict took aim at marriage equality:

People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.

The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.

Benedict has repeatedly condemned same-sex marriage as “defection in human nature” that bears an “immense human and economic cost.” Most recently, he used his World Day of Peace message to claim that marriage equality presents a “serious harm to justice and peace.”

Our guest bloggers are Crosby Burns, Research Associate, and Katie Miller, Special Assistant for LGBT Progress.

An LGBT activist pushes back on arguments about 'religious freedom.'

Beyond the so-called “fiscal cliff,” Congress has a number of other important items on its agenda before packing up for the holidays. This includes voting on the National Defense Authorization Act, a critical piece of legislation  that outlines the military budget and approves defense expenditures for Fiscal Year 2014. With respect to this bill, most members of Congress have rightly focused on funding the programs and initiatives that preserve our security and care for our troops. However, instead of working to pass the single most important bill to our military,  anti-gay Republicans  have  spent the year playing politics with our national security by inserting irrelevant amendments in the defense bill that are squarely aimed at rolling back the military’s strides toward LGBT equality following “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal.

Earlier this year, Congressman Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin (R-MO) succeeded in including a harmful and anti-gay “conscious clause” in the House version of the defense bill. If the Akin Provision were to be included in the NDAA in its entirety, it would give service members the legal right to discriminate, harass, and intimidate LGB troops. And in doing so it would pose a danger to troops’ health and safety, it would undermine unit cohesion, and — as the White House has stated — it would be a threat to the good order and discipline necessary for military effectiveness. Luckily, the Senate version of the bill did not include this harmful provision.

As the House and Senate began to reconcile the differences between the two bills, Congressman Akin and other Republicans, including Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), have pushed to include Akin’s “license to discriminate” provision in the final version. McCain was, of course, a fierce opponent of DADT repeal. McKeon said that he’d rather see Congress fail to pass a defense bill for the first time in a half century than pass a bill that failed into include anti-gay amendments.

In the reconciled version of the Pentagon bill, Congress has sadly retained the Akin amendment, though not in its entirety. What remains is a watered down version which reaffirms the right of troops and chaplains to hold anti-gay views as long as they are not actively discriminating against LGB service members. In other words, the amended Akin provision simply reiterates existing religious liberty protections that service members and chaplains already enjoy.

While Congressman Akin’s amendment did not survive as originally written, let’s be clear. Congressman Akin’s original “conscious clause” provision was not about protecting the religious liberty of service members or chaplains. It is instead about giving people in the military a legal right to discriminate, harass, and intimidate service members based on their sexual orientation.

We’ve seen this before. In the states, conservative groups are vociferously calling for a weakening of nondiscrimination, relationship recognition, adoption, and other laws all in the name of “religious liberty.” When a restaurant owner refuses to serve a patron because he or she is old, black, or Christian, we would never call that an affront to religious freedom. We would call it discrimination, plain and simple. The same is true for gay individuals as well.

In this way, anti-gay initiatives are increasingly being cloaked in arguments about “religious freedom.” That is because opponents of LGBT equality have seen the polls and know that strong majorities of Americans are now accepting of LGBT people. By working to insert “conscious clauses” into laws, they are hoping to slow down the inevitable march toward fairness for all. Going into 2013, advocates must be on the lookout for these attempts to undermine LGBT equality, and call them out for what they are: discriminatory, unfair, and wrong.

Today the Institute of Medicine released a new report, Collecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data in Electronic Health Records. This report is a summary of a one-day workshop on LGBT data collection held at the IOM in October 2012, and it presents a variety of viewpoints on collecting these data in health care settings. Ultimately, these viewpoints converge on a common principle: collecting sexual orientation and gender identity data is a crucial component of making sure that LGBT people are getting the health care they need.

The workshop featured 19 presentations from experts in LGBT data collection, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, providers at the forefront of efforts to appropriately collect and use these data in health care settings, health information technology vendors, and LGBT health advocates. The report compiles these presentations, along with comments from attendees and discussions following each presentation, into five chapters:

Clinical reasons to collect data on sexual orientation and gender identity, both from a population perspective and as it applies to an individual’s health care, along with personal stories illustrating the barriers and discrimination that LGBT people experience in health care settings.

The role of the federal government in developing methods for collecting sexual orientation and gender identity data in electronic health records and ensuring patient privacy and confidentiality.

Describing the experiences of several health care systems in developing and implementing questions on sexual orientation and gender identity and incorporating the data in electronic health records.

Issues involved in developing standardized questions for collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity and examples of questions that have been field tested and deployed in actual clinical settings.

Comments from participants and final observations on themes that arose during the workshop.

Among the comments were some from the Center for American Progress’s perspective, which cautioned against entering a new regime of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in health care and noted that we do not have to choose between preparing patients to disclose their sexual orientation and gender identity and training providers and health staff to elicit this information — we can do both. CAP also emphasized that those working to advance efforts to improve LGBT data collection in clinical encounters need to stay focused on both the training component and the data collection component, so that we arrive at a place where providers know that they should ask and patients feel like they can tell.

Other themes that arose from the workshop and that are summarized in the report include the following:

LGBT people experience significant health care disparities, and the Obama administration and HHS are committed to identifying and addressing those disparities through the use of data.

To address health care disparities in the LGBT population, it is important to identify and understand the barriers that these Americans face and to determine if nondiscrimination policies meant to eliminate those barriers are truly protecting LGBT individuals when they seek health care in real-world settings.

“If you are not counted, you do not count.” The health of every individual depends on disclosing sexual orientation and gender identity, so it is important to educate LGBT people about the need for them to self-identify while at the same time creating a safe environment conducive for doing so.

In addition to technical issues about the questions they need to ask their patients, health care providers have their own fears and biases that will require a significant amount of education to address, both on an individual and institutional level.

Employee resource groups in an institution can become a powerful and important internal force of change.

The use of language in questions about sexual orientation or identity and gender identity is becoming more precise, and that will improve the quality of the resulting data collected using these questions.

It is important as a matter of principle that data is always collected through a self-identification process and that there is always an opt-out option available to patients.

It is expected that this report will provide a foundation for further efforts to collect LGBT data in health care settings, in electronic records systems, and in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

In a stunning reversal, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) said this week that he thinks his party needs to “accommodate and deal with reality” and get on board with legal equality for same-sex couples. Gingrich, who pushed the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) through Congress in 1996, has been one of the nation’s most consistent opponents of marriage equality.

The Huffington Post reports:

On gay marriage, meanwhile, Gingrich argued that Republicans could no longer close their eyes to the course of public opinion. While he continued to profess a belief that marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, he suggested that the party (and he himself) could accept a distinction between a “marriage in a church from a legal document issued by the state” — the latter being acceptable.

“I think that this will be much more difficult than immigration for conservatism to come to grips with,” he said, noting that the debate’s dynamics had changed after state referenda began resulting in the legalization of same-sex marriage. “It is in every family. It is in every community. The momentum is clearly now in the direction in finding some way to … accommodate and deal with reality. And the reality is going to be that in a number of American states — and it will be more after 2014 — gay relationships will be legal, period.”

Despite Gingrich’s two divorces and history of infidelity, he has attempted to present himself as a defender of traditional marriage throughout his unsuccessful campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He signed the National Organization for Marriage’s pledge to support a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex unions. He said the movement toward marriage equality was a “temporary aberration that will dissipate” and compared same-sex relationships to “pagan behaviors.”

What a difference an election makes.

After voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington all rejected Gingrich’s marriage inequality position, Gingrich now thinks marriage equality is “inevitable.”

Noting that his own openly-lesbian half-sister works for the Human Rights Campaign and that he has gay friends who have married legally in Iowa, Gingrich observed, “I didn’t think that was inevitable 10 or 15 years ago, when we passed the Defense of Marriage Act. It didn’t seem at the time to be anything like as big a wave of change as we are now seeing.”

A group of conservative organizations based in Illinois have banded together to oppose efforts to pass marriage equality there. Because of the success of marriage equality efforts in other states, high polling on the issue, and the popularity of civil unions, state lawmakers may take up the issue as soon as January’s lame-duck session. The new coalition of opposition is calling itself the “Coalition to Protect Children and Marriage,” and includes the Eagle Forum of Illinois, Catholic Citizens of Illinois, the Thomas More Law Center, and the Illinois Family Institute. The IFI has been classified as a hate group for its anti-LGBT rhetoric, and its Director, David Smith, has more to offer:

SMITH: Government did not create marriage. It merely recognizes and promotes this type of relationship that exists and which protects the rights and serves the best interests of children and, therefore, of society. Research has consistently demonstrated that children fare best when raised, whenever possible, by their biological parents. The state has a vested interest in promoting this institution because it provides the ideal environment in which to raise the next generation of healthy and productive members of society.

Studies have debunked claims that children fare any differently with same-sex parents than with opposite-sex parents, but IFI has no problem clinging to this myth. Smith’s comments are offensive to all adoptive parents, including those who are heterosexual. Besides, Illinois same-sex couples are already raising children, and marriage will help those families. This coalition has made it clear it will rely on the old tropes of procreation to make their case, which suggests they will not be very effective at swaying opinion.

The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins never misses an opportunity to defame the LGBT community while painting conservative Christians as victims, and his latest exploit may signify a petty new low for the hate group. In his Washington Watch Daily Radio Commentary on Monday, Perkins defended the Salvation Army for being anti-gay and claimed that the LGBT community is selfish and only targets the organization because it’s Christian:

The Salvation Army does a lot for America, but don’t expect a ringing endorsement from homosexuals. Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. Gay activists will be putting a little something in the red kettle this year-but it won’t be money. They’re asking people to drop in complaints instead because the Salvation Army has a biblical view of sexuality.

Despite decades of community service, activists say those kettles are pushing an anti-gay agenda. Nothing could be future from the truth says Major George Hood. You don’t have to be straight to get help from the Salvation Army, he explained. Not a single “policy, practice, or program” even asks about sexual orientation. “The very mission of the Salvation Army calls for meeting the needs of humans without discrimination.”

The truth is, homosexuals are only targeting the Salvation Army because it’s Christian. And they’d rather help their agenda than the needy. Do your part to help the Salvation Army-because far too many families are saved by their bells.

LGBT bloggers Bil Browning and John Aravosis have thoroughly cataloged the Salvation Army’s anti-gay record. Major Hood, Perkins’ ringing endorsement for LGBT-inclusion, defended the notion of discriminating against gay employees in 2001 because “it really begins to chew away at the theological fabric of who we are.” The Church has hidden its position statement on homosexuality, claiming it’s “Under Review,” but it previously believed the following:

Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. The Salvation Army believes, therefore, that Christians whose sexual orientation is primary or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life. There is no scriptural support for same sex unions as equal to, or as an alternative to, heterosexual marriage.

Seeking special protection to not hire gay employees and condemning gays to a life without love is hardly a good record “without discrimination.” That’s not to say the Salvation Army doesn’t accomplish good works, just like many other organizations that engage in charity but have anti-gay policies, like the Boy Scouts of America. But these are clearly groups that reinforce stigma against gay people and actively engage in discrimination, so it’s perfectly reasonable for LGBT activists to suggest supporting organizations that don’t instead. To suggest that this has anything to do with an attack on religion or an aversion to charity is a ghastly ad hominem attack against the LGBT community. It’s as absurd as suggesting that opposition to Chick-fil-A is based on hatred for fried chicken. What’s at stake is a basic level of respect for people’s lives, and it’s outlandish for Perkins to claim that groups (like his) who have none are somehow victims.