Monday’s edition of Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, features a front-page editorial attacking French Catholic magazine Temoignage Chretien (“Christian Witness”) for supporting marriage equality. The editorial claims that same-sex couples exist in “a different reality” because they are unable to conceive children, and goes on to claim that marriage equality is part of some socialist “utopia”:

Saying that marriage between a woman and a man is equal to that between two homosexuals is, in fact, a denial of the truth that affects one of the basic structures of human society, the family. We cannot base a society on these foundations without then paying a very high price as happened in the past when there was an attempt to achieve total economic and social equality. Why repeat the same mistake and chase after an unattainable utopia?

The editorial comes on the heels of Pope Benedict’s World Peace Day 2013 address claiming that marriage equality threatens “serious harm to justice and peace.” Though the Catholic Church has always condemned homosexuality as “sinful,” cries of “socialism” represent a new low for the Holy See’s desperation to oppose LGBT equality.

A former employee is suing the anti-gay Family Research Council for sexual harassment, citing the sexually suggestive comments of her supervisor, particularly in regards to birth control.

Moira Gaul worked as director of women’s and reproductive health for the FRC, an anti-gay hate group that claims to represent “traditional family values.” Her expertise is in abstinence-only education. But even for a woman ideologically aligned with such a socially conservative organization, the anti-woman rhetoric of her supervisor proved too much:

According to court documents first obtained and reported by journalist Evan Gahr, former FRC employee Moira Gaul, 42, filed a complaint in 2009 with the District of Columbia Human Rights Commission in which she accused her supervisor of gender discrimination. She claimed that her boss, the director of the Center for Human Life and Bioethics at the time, referred to the use of birth control pills as “whoring around,” addressed emails to her with the words “hi cutie,” pressured her to attend parties, and referred to her as a “young, attractive woman.”

“His attitude toward me and other women was rude, belittling, and at times, angry,” she wrote in the complaint.

Gaul’s supervisor’s comments are reminiscent of the assertion by Rush Limbaugh that young women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke was on birth control because she was having “so much sex.” FRC has been one of those groups most opposed to the contraception mandate requiring employers to cover contraception under the Affordable Care Act. The organization promotes abstinence-only sex education and is rabidly anti-gay.

The Huffington Post reports that the suit was originally settled back in 2009, but that it has re-emerged because Gaul and her attorney believe the FRC illegally retaliated against her for filing the original suit.

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO)

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) is departing the House at the end of this year, but he’s trying to force some of his odious anti-gay rhetoric into law before he goes. Earlier this year, he proposed an amendment to the defense budget that would create a “license to bully” for military personnel, essentially guaranteeing that anybody who has a problem with LGBT people can’t be disciplined for it, even if they’re engaging in blatant discrimination or harassment.

The House passed the amendment, but the Senate didn’t give the idea any consideration. Now that the bill is in conference, Republican leaders are trying to add it back in.

The conference is being negotiated by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), both of whom opposed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) and have substantial anti-gay records. When McKeon assumed leadership of the House Armed Services Committee, he pledged to pass clean defense bills that were “not weighed down” by social issues, but for the past two years, he has done just the opposite, supporting anti-gay measures like Akin’s and others. Though none of the measures advanced by the House last year survived conference with the Senate, a House Democratic aide says McCain and McKeon are “pushing pretty hard” to get Akin’s through this year.

OutServe-SLDN’s Allyson Robinson points out that Akin’s measure would foster the kind of unit cohesion problems Republicans incorrectly claimed DADT repeal would cause:

ROBINSON: As a former military commander, I can tell you that allowing any service member to openly discriminate against a comrade in this way will compromise good order and discipline — the very thing supporters of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ falsely claimed was going to happen back when we repealed the law. The fact is, there are already strong protections for all service members, including chaplains, in place, and all this provision would do is create a license to discriminate. The next Secretary of Defense should not be saddled with a law that makes it harder for small unit commanders in the field to lead their troops.

Conference negotiations for the defense budget bill have been underway for several days already, and it’s unclear when they will conclude. Hopefully Congress will find a way to support the military without endorsing mistreatment of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual troops proudly serving their country.

East Aurora School Board

Illinois’s East Aurora School Board does not have the courage of its convictions, having once again given up on protecting transgender students. In October, the district innocuously passed a policy that would protect transgender students’ ability to identity with their authentic gender. The Illinois Family Institute, an anti-LGBT hate group, objected to the accommodations for “gender-confused teens,” and four days after passing it, the school board rescinded the policy.

Despite caving, there was hope that East Aurora would still do right by its trans students. The board formed an ad hoc committee to explore the issues with a goal of forming an alternative policy. However, when the committee met, over a hundred community members came to protest, claiming that protecting trans students was somehow “destructive” and that it would threaten the safety of other students if they were allowed to use the appropriate bathrooms. These arguments were of course spurred again by the Illinois Family Institute, which went so far as to encourage the bullying of trans students. The outcry overwhelmed the committee, which decided to put the transgender policy on hold. Now, they’ve abandoned it entirely.

The committee was not designed to be effective in the first place. Rather than focus on researching the policy, the committee allowed itself to be overwhelmed by public comment. The crowd was so against the effort that security had to be called to protect committee members. Anthony Martinez, executive director of Illinois LGBT advocacy group The Civil Rights Agenda, sat on the committee and described it as a “failure of leadership”:

MARTINEZ: I think it was a failure of leadership by the school board. I think the folks handling this from the beginning were out of their depth. You only have to look and see that the Ad Hoc committee never once discussed the matter of policy. All we did was sit and listen to people voice their displeasure.

Indeed, the school board’s failure was ever questioning itself in the first place or creating space for a hate group’s influence to play out. The end result was stirred up antipathy towards trans people with no real progress for the safety of the students at risk.