On a 228-196 vote, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives adopted a rules package for the 113th Congress that explicitly authorizes the House’s legal arm to spend taxpayer dollars to defend the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). They embraced this unnecessary spending minutes after newly re-elected Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) warned that the rising national debt was an “anchor” weighing down the American Dream.

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 same-sex couples who have legally wed in their states countless federal benefits and protections, such as Social Security survivor benefits if one partner dies, and allows other states to refuse to recognize those unions.

The rules authorize the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, controlled by Boehner, Republican Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), and Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to:

(i) to act as successor in interest to the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the 112th Congress with respect to civil actions in which it intervened in the 112th Congress to defend the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (1 U.S.C. 7) or related provisions of titles 10, 31, and 38, United States Code, including in the case of Windsor v. United States, 833 F. Supp.2d 394 (S.D.N.Y. June 6, 2012), aff’d, 699 F.3d 169 (2d Cir. Oct. 18, 2012), cert. granted, No. 12–307 (Dec. 7, 2012), cert. pending No. 12–63 (July 16, 2012) and 12-ll (Dec.___2012);

(ii) to take such steps as may be appropriate to ensure continuation of such civil actions; and

(iii) to intervene in other cases that involve a challenge to the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act or related provisions of titles 10, 31, and 38, United States Code.

(B) Pursuant to clause 8 of rule II, the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group continues to speak for, and articulate the institutional position of, the House in all litigation matters in which it appears, including in Windsor v. United States.

The House Republican leadership has already authorized $2 million in payments to Bancroft PLLC and former Solicitor General Paul Clement (R) for their legal services in defending the 1996 law. The U.S. Department of Justice stopped defending DOMA in February 2011 after determining the law to be in conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

An array of House Democrats spoke out against the provisions, including Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), who called the bill a “typical tax-and-spend” Republican policy. Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in a statement that “BLAG does not speak for all Members of the House of Representatives and we will continue to oppose this wasteful use of taxpayer funds to defend DOMA.” Just one Republican, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), joined the Democrats in opposing the package.

Both Republicans who have endorsed DOMA repeal, Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Richard Hanna (R-NY), sided with their party leadership to adopt the rules.

The National Organization for Marriage has committed to another campaign of vengeance against any Republican lawmakers in Illinois that votes to support marriage equality. According to a press release today, NOM has committed $250,000 toward a state PAC dedicated to defeating pro-equality Republicans:

“Any Republican in Illinois who betrays the cause of marriage will be casting a career-ending vote and will be held accountable to their constituents,” said Brian Brown, NOM’s president. “We will spend whatever it takes — hundreds of thousands of dollars if necessary — to remove them from office, just as we did three of the four turncoat Republican state Senators in New York who were responsible for gay ‘marriage’ passing there. We will not hesitate to support pro-family Democrats to replace them, as our record in New York proves.”

As usual, NOM grossly distorts its campaign in New York. Not only did its vengeance campaign make no impact on marriage equality in the state, two of the three Republicans who were replaced lost to pro-equality Democrats, not “pro-family Democrats” as Brown implies.

NOM also called for the resignation of Illinois Republican Party Chair Pat Brady to resign, deeming him “unfit to continue” in his position because he is supporting marriage equality. The Illinois Family Institute’s president David E. Smith went a step farther, publishing Brady’s personal cell phone number on Facebook and inviting followers to harass him into stepping down. These petty bullying tactics show that anti-gay groups will sink to any low if they cannot win on the merits of their position — suggesting a resignation that they’ve already lost.

A coalition of conservative Illinois religious leaders has written a letter to state lawmakers opposing marriage equality. Driven by the Catholic Conference of Illinois, the small coalition also includes the Mormon Church, the Lutheran Church Missoui Synod, the Anglican Church, and The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. In addition to describing same-sex marriage as “full of serious danger,” the letter claims that “religious freedom” should include the right to discriminate against same-sex couples in any aspect of society:

Some claim that as long as religious ministers are not forced to preside over same-sex “marriages” the principle of religious freedom, as secured in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment is protected. However, the notion that the exercise of religious freedom is confined to the interior of churches, synagogues, temples or mosques or what one does on Holy Days is wrong and dangerous.  The freedom of religion also extends to the ministries of religious organizations and to the individual conscience. Thus, the real peril: if marriage is redefined in civil law, individuals and religious organizations – regardless of deeply held beliefs – will be compelled to treat same-sex unions as the equivalent of marriage in their lives, ministries and operations.  Compulsion of this nature is a violation of personal conscience and of religious liberty.

The gall of this claim is not to be understated. These groups are demanding the “freedom” to treat gays and lesbian as second-class citizens in society, whether that means employers denying spousal benefits to married gay employees, or businesses denying services that might involve acknowledging that a same-sex couple is married. This is not ” religious freedom”; it is a blatant will to discriminate.

The National Organization for Marriage posted this letter disingenuously claiming it represented “1,700 faith communities” in Illinois. In reality, it bears only 12 names — six of whom are Catholic bishops — and claims to represent only 27 other churches. Last month, over 250 Illinois faith leaders signed a letter supporting marriage equality.

Massachusetts State Reps. Jim Lyons (R) and Marc Lombardo (R) do not like the fact that a federal judge has ordered the state to pay the legal fees of a transgender prison inmate who successfully sued the state Department of Corrections after she was illegally denied sex reassignment surgery. While the state appeals the ruling, the two have taken the unusual step of co-authoring a bill to require the state to pay up to $700,000 in legal fees for every law-abiding Massachusetts citizen, the Tewksbury Patch reports.

In their joint press release, Lyons defended the proposal as a matter of equality:

“This is an issue of fundamental fairness,” Lyons emphasized. “The hard working citizens who follow the rules and pay their taxes do not qualify for benefits like this. If we provide extravagant benefits like this to a vicious murderer, then why deny them to the law abiding citizenry? It’s a simple matter of fairness and justice.”

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had an estimated population of 6,587,536 in 2011. Assuming that the vast majority of these are law-abiding citizens, a $700,000 entitlement could cost the state more than $4.6 trillion if every resident became a party to a lawsuit.

According to the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, the state took in about $18.5 billion in revenue in 2010. If that amount held constant, it would take the Massachusetts about 250 years to pay that amount — assuming every penny of state revenue was dedicated only to paying the potential legal fees for those alive today. If more law-abiding people moved into the state or new ones were born, the potential liability could skyrocket even more.

Making matters worse, Reps. Lyons and Lombardo have actually proposed significant income tax, sales tax, and meals tax rollbacks, with a Herman Cain-like “5-5-5 plan”. Passage of these would further erode the state’s ability to pay the legal bills he seeks to cover.

Given that the state spent more than twice as much on its own legal fees than it would have cost to pay for the surgery the inmate’s doctors recommended, real fiscal conservatives would question the state’s refusal to comply with the law — rather than push to compound the wasteful spending exponentially.

Both Lyons and Lombardo voted against the state’s 2011 gender identity rights law, which protects transgender citizens against discrimination in employment, housing, K-12 public education, and credit.

For almost six years, fortnightly “Soho Masses” have been offered in the London borough of Westminster that were designed to be “particularly welcoming” to LGBT Catholics and their friends and families. But Archbishop Vincent Nichols has now announced that the Masses will cease and the group that organized them has been asked to focus on pastoral care. Nichols’ announcement features a unique admission about Catholic teaching, which is to deny that a person’s sexual orientation is part of their identity:

Over these years, the situation of people with same-sex attraction has changed both socially and in civil law. However the principles of the pastoral care to be offered by the Church and the Church’s teaching on matters of sexual morality have not. First among the principles of pastoral care is the innate dignity of every person and the respect in which they must be held. Also, of great importance, is the teaching of the Church that a person must not be identified by their sexual orientation . The moral teaching of the Church is that the proper use of our sexual faculty is within a marriage, between a man and a woman, open to the procreation and nurturing of new human life. As I stated in March 2012, this means ‘that many types of sexual activity, including same-sex sexual activity, are not consistent with the teaching of the Church. No individual, bishop, priest or lay-person, is in a position to change this teaching of the Church which we hold to be God-given.’This is the calling to which we must all strive.

The Catholic Church has always refused to acknowledge the existence of gays and lesbians as a community, instead focusing on “persons with same-sex attractions.” Indeed, its Courage ministry, which demands that gay Catholics be chaste if they wish to honor their faith, draws a distinction between “the confines of the homosexual identity” and “a more complete one in Christ.” Using the same shaming tactics as ex-gay therapy, Courage’s mission implies there can be no such thing as a gay Catholic. Still, Nichols’ candid explanation that people should never be identified by their sexual orientation demonstrates how disinterested the Church is in accepting even the most basic realities of sexuality.

The LGBT group Stonewall rebuked Nichols’ decision, responding that “it’s a real shame he’s taken away an opportunity for gay Catholics to celebrate mass in a safe environment.”

In December, the Ninth Circuit granted conservative groups an injunction against a new California law banning harmful ex-gay therapy from being offered to minors, preventing it from taking effect January 1. The temporary delay allows the Court time to hear the case and address the conflicting rulings offered by lower courts in two different suits challenging the law. In the meantime, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has appealed the injunction, calling on the Court to focus on the decision upholding the ban issued by U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller.

The Liberty Counsel, which is leading one of the lawsuits along with the ex-gay organization NARTH, boasted the injunction when it was granted last month, doubling down on some of the most absurd and offensive claims used to justify ex-gay therapy. In particular, Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver reiterated claims that sexual abuse is somehow responsible for young people’s same-sex orientations:

STAVER: The minors we represent have not and do not want to act on same-sex attractions, nor do they want to engage in such behavior. They are greatly benefiting from counseling. These minors have struggled with same-sex attraction and have been able to reduce or eliminate the stress and conflict in their lives by receiving counseling that best aligns with their religious and moral values.

Without this emergency injunction, the State of California would essentially barge into the private therapy rooms of victimized young people and tell them that their confusion caused by the likes of a Jerry Sandusky abuser is normal and they should pursue their unwanted same-sex sexual attractions and behavior.

Staver neglects to explain that the “stress and conflict” these young people experience is only the result of the family rejection that the Liberty Counsel and ex-gay advocates foment. Studies that have attempted to show correlations between sexual abuse and homosexuality have been largely inconclusive, and certainly plenty of gay people have never experienced abuse. Such claims only seek to stigmatize by implying that people with same-sex orientations are disordered and may themselves have a propensity for abuse themselves, which is completely unfounded.

In the state’s appeal of the injunction, California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) cited mainstream medical opinion, condemning ex-gay therapy as “unsound and harmful.”

President Obama has signed the National Defense Authorization Act, but he issued several signing statements qualifying his measured support of its various provisions. In particular, he condemned the “conscience clause” included in the conference version of the bill, a watered-down version of the “license to discriminate” proposed by Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) last year. President Obama made it clear he will not tolerate any attempt to promote anti-gay views in the military:

Section 533 is an unnecessary and ill-advised provision, as the military already appropriately protects the freedom of conscience of chaplains and service members. The Secretary of Defense will ensure that the implementing regulations do not permit or condone discriminatory actions that compromise good order and discipline or otherwise violate military codes of conduct. My Administration remains fully committed to continuing the successful implementation of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and to protecting the rights of gay and lesbian service members; Section 533 will not alter that.

The final version of the language was so softened from its original proposal so as to simply be a redundant iteration of protections that already exist ensuring servicemembers cannot be penalized for their beliefs. Still, its inclusion represents conservatives’ latest attempt to protect anti-gay discrimination and stigma under the shroud of “religious freedom.”