It has come to light that House Administration Committee Chairman Dan Lungren (R-CA) secretly approved a $500,000 increase to a contract with a private law firm to defend the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in federal court. While the increase was approved in September, neither the public nor the Democratic House minority was informed until this week, Roll Call reports.

The contract now authorizes Bancroft PLLC and former Solicitor General Paul Clement (R) to spend up to $2 million in to defend DOMA — the second increase to what was originally a $1 million cap. The U.S. Department of Justice stopped defending the 1996 law in February 2011 after determining the law to be in conflict with the U.S. Constittuion.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) denounced the increased expense in a statement:

It’s bad enough that Speaker Boehner and House Republicans are wasting taxpayer dollars to defend the indefensible Defense of Marriage Act – and losing in every case. Now, they have reached a new low – signing a secret contract to spend more public money on their legal boondoggle without informing Democrats. Their actions are simply unconscionable; their decisions are utterly irresponsible.

Hiding this contract from voters in the midst of an election season was a cynical move at best, and a betrayal of the public trust at worst. With Americans focused on the creation of jobs and the growth of our economy, Republicans should not be spending $2 million to defend discrimination in our country.

Though Lungren lost re-election in November, the Republicans maintained control of the House — and its operating budget.

At a Thursday press conference — ironically focusing on his view that “Washington has a spending problem” — House Speaker John Boehner was asked about the expenditures. The Ohio Republican angrily responded that if the Department of Justice won’t defend the law of the land, Congress will.

Last week, NARTH, a professional organization for ex-gay profiteers, released new “Practice Guidelines for the Treatment of Unwanted Same-Sex Attractions and Behavior.” This document strives to legitimize ex-gay therapy by downplaying research that shows the efforts to be ineffective and potentially harmful and emphasizing myths about what may “cause” homosexuality, like the impact of sexual abuse. According to the guidelines, clinicians who seek to affirm homosexuality — that is, the preponderance of mainstream therapists — are actually engaging in bias against clients’ religion when they deny the possibility of sexual reorientation:

Furthermore, clinicians with a strong gay-affirming position may tend to emphasize clinical literature that describes examples of harm — such as disappointment in not achieving complete sexual reorientation — in the course of change-oriented therapy and may decide that conducting such therapy is clearly unethical and harmful. They may maintain this view even when clients explicitly say they want to change their unwanted same-sex attractions and/or behavior. These clinicians may believe that clients cannot establish realistic therapeutic goals for themselves nor make a truly voluntary decision to develop their heterosexual potential, assuming that clients want to change only because they have been oppressed and discriminated against by society.

They may discount the reality that many clients who want to explore the possibility of change experience significant conflict between their religious beliefs and their same-sex attraction and that religious affiliation may be the most stable aspect of a client’s identity. Some clinicians have even equated agreeing to help someone develop their heterosexual potential as analogous to agreeing to help an anorexic lose weight. They may tend to espouse the immutability of sexual orientation, basing this conclusion on unsubstantiated biological research — a conclusion that remains premature.

This perspective demonstrates the naivete inherent in bias toward ex-gay treatments. First, ex-gay proponents take advantage of clients’ desire to change their sexual orientation by reinforcing it, essentially sacrificing professional perspective in the process by giving clients’ desired outcomes priority over reality. Then, they place sexual orientation and religious beliefs on a false equal footing, suggesting that sexual orientation might be easier to change if the client’s religious affiliation is more “stable.” This ignores that research has repeatedly demonstrated there is an enduring biological component to sexual orientation, whereas religious beliefs are simply ideas that many people change throughout their lives.

Therapy is not like consumer economics where “the customer is always right.” Rather than help clients work through the conflict they’re experiencing because of their sexual orientation, ex-gay profiteers attempt to milk that conflict by reinforcing it and promising change that will never actually be accomplished. That they defend this strategy by claiming to be less biased by research shows that they care more about profiting off their assumptions than actually helping clients achieve wellness.

The Ft. Bragg Officers’ Spouses group is blatantly discriminating against Ashley Broadway, a lesbian spouse who is seeking to join the group, inventing reasons to keep her out that are not currently part of its by-laws. On Wednesday, the group released a statement championing its own work and announcing that no action would be taken until its next board meeting, presumably after the holidays:

In response to recent interest in the membership requirements of our organization, we will review the issue at our next board meeting. This will be our first opportunity for our board to discuss the issue since it has been brought to our attention. We intend to review the request in a timely manner. As an all-volunteer board during this busy holiday season, we request your patience in allowing us to properly address and review this membership issue while fulfilling our obligations to our current membership as well as to our families.

OutServe-SLDN criticized the group for this stalling tactic, pointing out that “The group doesn’t need a meeting… It simply needs to accept Ashley into its membership, and it should do so immediately.” A Pentagon spokesman told BuzzFeed that the Department of Defense is “conducting a deliberative and comprehensive review” of what benefits can be extended to same-sex couples. That “review” has hypothetically been underway since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell took effect in 15 months ago and has no foreseeable endpoint. Even still, the spouses group does not fall under the Department’s purview, and thus it bears full responsibility for its discrimination against Broadway.

Uganda Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi

Despite expectations the Ugandan Parliament might imminently consider the “Kill The Gays” Anti-Homosexuality Bill, the legislation has been pushed down the agenda to a lower spot, raising questions as to whether it might even come up before the holidays. Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi has made a peculiar statement about homosexuality that seemingly softens the government’s support of the bill while continuing to endorse a ban on LGBT advocacy:

MBABAZI: In Uganda, we have had homosexuality for generations. Everybody knows it. You know, various local languages, we have a name for homosexuals, don’t we? We do. That means it has been there. Whoever had the homosexual was.. was killed. But there is a way in our cultures, we handle them to show our displeasure and no-acceptance of homosexual activities — homosexuality and homosexual activities, you should mark the difference between the two. Okay?

We know that in our own Penal Code, we carried this from the British. We amended this law, the Penal Code by Parliament (I’ve forgotten the year). That particular provision was amended. So it is unlawful already. So to the extent that it is unlawful, and the attempt in this bill to repeat what is already unlawful is not something we’ll support, supporting what is already in the bill. Why? Why would we support it? Because it’s already covered.

But there are certain aspects which may be new, like promotion of homosexuality, things like that. Those are things, when we come to debate, we’ll [unintelligible]… We set up a committee which has made a report, we go through this…

Watch it:

As Box Turtle Bulletin notes, the statement is a puzzling one. Uganda has received a lot of negative international attention from not just the Anti-Homosexuality bill, but also financial scandals in the Prime Minister’s office and civil wars. Perhaps minimizing attention to this particular bill is one way to win back some international favor. Still, given the frequent myths circulated by the legislation’s proponents, the statement could simply be further obfuscations.

Our guest blogger is Aisha Moodie-Mills, advisor on LGBT Policy and Racial Justice at the Center for American Progress.

The U.S. Senate held a landmark hearing Wednesday on ending the nation’s school-to-prison pipeline that affirmed that gay and transgender youth also face harsher punishments in schools than other students, which disproportionately pipeline them into the juvenile justice system.

Senator Dick Durbin, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, which hosted the hearing, acknowledged in his opening statement that harsh school sanctions — such as zero-tolerance policies — do indeed have a disparate impact on LGBT youth, just as they do on racial and ethnic minorities.  He stated for the record that:

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students are more likely to be disciplined [in schools] and arrested than their peers.

This marks the first time LGBT youth have been officially included in federal efforts to end the school-to-prison pipeline.

According to a report this summer by the Center for American Progress:

• Gay and transgender youth, particularly gender nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their heterosexual counterparts.

• As with racial disparities in school discipline, these higher rates of punishment do not correlate to higher rates of misbehavior among gay and transgender youth.

• LGBT youth make up 13-15 percent of the juvenile justice system, even though they make-up only 5–7 percent of the population overall, and 60 percent of these youth are black or Latino.

• This high rate of contact with the system is due in part to harsh school sanctions often based on their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

School discipline policies across the United States have been under heightened scrutiny because of the disparate impact they have on youth of color, particularly black boys. Data released this spring from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights revealed that rigid school discipline policies — which lead to suspensions and expulsions of students for even the most minor offenses — perpetuate a school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately criminalizes youth of color.

But hidden among these school discipline data are thousands of gay and transgender youth, particularly those of color, who bear a double burden of disparate impact but are rendered all but invisible because this federal data does not include information on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Gay, Lesbian, Straight, Education Network (GLSEN) submitted testimony that called for measures to collect data on the experiences of LGBT youth with exclusionary discipline and zero tolerance policies:

While many civil rights organizations have the benefit of ample data, collected by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, to support their contention that students of color are disproportionately affected by zero tolerance and other exclusionary discipline policies, there is a relative scarcity of data on how these policies may affect LGBT students…

This data gap has proven to be a significant impediment to our administrative advocacy efforts to protect the rights of LGBT students – as co-equal with all other students – in schools.  While there are several interdepartmental working groups in the federal government focused on studying bullying of LGBT students (which we applaud) there is no serious effort to examine the extent to which official school discipline policy has similar effects on LGBT students as on students of color. Nor do we know whether a disproportionate number of students of color affected by exclusionary discipline may be LGBT.

Ten other leading LGBT organizations also signed on to GLSEN’s statement. Those organizations were: Family Equality Council, Gay-Straight Alliance Network, Human Rights Campaign, National Black Justice Coalition, National Center for Lesbian Rights, National Center for Transgender Equality, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, PFLAG National, The Trevor Project, and SMYAL.