After over four hours of heated debate, the Colorado House of Representatives has granted initial approval of the civil unions legislation with a resounding voice vote. Throughout the discussion, Republicans advanced several contentious amendments that would allow child placement services (like Catholic Charities), county clerks, and even average citizens (like bakers) to deny services to same-sex couples. All of those odious provisions failed to make it into the bill. The House is expected to grant final approval on Tuesday.

Last year, the then-Republican-controlled House killed civil unions using various techniques to prevent it coming to a full floor vote. What’s worse, the representative who cast the vote that doomed the bill has a gay son, who later accused his father of not taking a leadership role. As a result of these brash obstructionist tactics, Republicans lost their control of the House, and Democrats elected Rep. Mark Ferrandino, who is openly gay and an original sponsor of civil unions, to be Speaker. Ferrandino passionately defended the bill throughout the day, admitting he was getting “angrier and angrier” as Republicans repeatedly attempted to enshrine discrimination within its provisions.

The Senate has already approved the legislation and Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) is committed to signing it. According to a November poll, 70 percent of Coloradans support civil unions.

In early January, Illinois Republican Party Chairman Pat Brady spoke out in favor of marriage equality. Despite push-back from conservatives, as well as the National Organization for Marriage, Brady stood by his position. Last week, the state Republican Party’s central committee organized a meeting to consider ousting Brady over his controversial endorsement, but that meeting ended up not happening.

According to the State Journal-Register, the committee canceled that Saturday meeting late on Friday for two reasons: concern that firing Brady would limit the party’s appeal to moderate voters and more importantly, because it became clear that there weren’t enough votes. Apparently there were some members who had concerns about Brady that weren’t related to his position on marriage, but they didn’t want to be associated with the people opposed to him for that.

A recent study found that supporting marriage equality does not endanger Republicans’ chances of re-election, except when other conservatives wage campaigns of vengeance.

Emory University is in Atlanta, Georgia, just 20 miles from the Chick-fil-A corporate headquarters. Since the full extent of Chick-fi-A’s anti-gay beliefs and giving fully came to light last summer, student leaders protested the continued presence of a franchise in the campus’s food court. In December, even the Student Government Association passed a resolution opposing Chick-fil-A. Ultimately, campus administrators issued a thoughtful statement acknowledging the stigma attached to the company, but explaining it was not grounds to cancel the contract. The students vowed not to back down, and now it seems Chick-fil-A will not be coming back to campus next year.

According to a tweet from Emory Wheel, the student newspaper, Chick-fil-A has been removed from the food court as part of its new layout. The full details for this change are not yet known, but some clues can be found in the statement originally provided by the university:

Any decision to by Sodexo [the campus dining contractor] to renew or not renew the contract with Chick-fil-A, or any other vendor, must be part of a dining vision to advance the purposes for which Emory has contracted with Sodexo. Opposing views must be acknowledged, recognizing that some differences are truly irreconcilable. [...]

Typical brand selection and replacement considerations include, but are not limited to, preferential surveys, strategic planning processes, campus master planning, sales trends, contract requirements, and brand re-imaging.

Perhaps the franchise’s sales plummeted, or perhaps it simply it no longer fit in the campus’s “master planning.” At any rate, it is a victory for LGBT students, who will no longer have to encounter a glowing symbol of anti-gay prejudice as they partake in lunch on campus.

Goldman Sachs joined nearly 300 other companies in filing an amicus brief challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) at the Supreme Court. According to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, supporting that brief was a matter of both civil rights and good business:

BLANKFEIN: At the end of the day, this aligns with my personal views, but I’m not using this as a platform to espouse my personal views. The only reason why most people are interested in what I have to say is because of what I represent at Goldman Sachs, and therefore I only use my platform for Goldman Sachs issues. This issue is a business issue; it’s a civil rights issue, but it’s also a business issue.

The ability for employment benefits to be shared among spouses, the ability to move people who are dependent on visas for trailing spouses — all hinges on being able to deal with families of gay people in the same way that you deal with families of straight people. Otherwise, they can’t move around, they’re unhappy, and we can’t attract a whole set of very talented people.

Watch it:

In the brief, the businesses point out that DOMA requires them to discriminate against their employees or assume a greater financial burden to provide them with the same benefits as their heterosexual colleagues.

Blankein said that there have not been severe consequences to the company’s support for equality, though he previously has admitted that some of their clients no longer wished to affiliate with them. The Human Rights Campaign has honored Blankfein for fostering an inclusive work environment.

Focus on the Family President Jim Daly

On Friday, the New York Times ran a puff piece about Focus on the Family, claiming that under the leadership of its president Jim Daly, the organization is softening by becoming one that “invites civil dialogue” and “turns down the rhetorical temperature on the debate.” It goes on to claim that Daly is “attesting to the divine love and grace that he firmly believes saved his life.”

Jeremy Hooper and David Badash have already penned extensive retorts, outlining the many odious anti-LGBT positions that Focus on the Family still holds. As a simple test of whether Focus on the Family and its political arm CitizenLink are engaging in more “civil dialogue,” here’s a look at some of the rhetoric they’ve put out over just the past six months:

• Marriage equality will “shut down businesses” and is actually about “silencing Christian voices in the public square.”
• Marriage equality is a “pernicious lie of Satan.”
• Gender and sexuality are determined by procreation, not anybody’s own sense of their identities.
• Homosexuality isn’t a “super sin,” but it’s still a sin, just like adultery, lying, cheating, and gossiping.
• There’s no such thing as being gay; it’s just a “political statement.”
• Marriage equality passed in November because voters are “unchurched” and care more about themselves than about children.
• Transgender identities are unhealthy disorders that result from childhood trauma.
• Trans people should pursue ex-trans therapy to rectify their “confusion” with their “God given gender identity and destiny.”
• Gay people are in “pain” and at battle with God.
• Heterosexuality is society’s ideal because affirming homosexuality would be “normalizing brokenness.”
• “Satan roams the earth like a lion, using sexual and relational brokenness to destroy individuals, families, churches, groups, businesses.”
• Parents should be able to prevent their children from learning that gay people exist.
• There are “a variety of roads into homosexuality” including molestation, parents’ divorce, and trouble conforming to gender roles.

And that was just the rhetoric that ThinkProgress happened to cover since last September. Of course, Focus on the Family also sponsors the annual “Day of Dialogue,” which encourages Christian students to condemn their gay peers — a counterprotest to the “Day of Silence,” which is designed to bring visibility to that very kind of bullying.

The New York Times should better clarify that not a single position has changed at Focus on the Family. As the article inadvertently demonstrates, the organization has simply achieved better PR when individuals aren’t paying attention to what they actually believe.

Headlines this weekend praised The Queen for promoting gay rights in a new Commonwealth Charter, which includes this commitment to civil rights:

We are implacably opposed to all forms of  discrimination, whether rooted  in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds.

The “other grounds” is meant to refer to sexuality, but was kept ambiguous because some of the commonwealth countries still have strict laws against homosexuality. Her live speech will add that rights must “include everyone,” apparently another nod at gay rights.

Though the public display of her signing and live speech is notable, British LGBT groups are not impressed by the allusion. Prominent activist Peter Tatchell had higher expectations:

TATCHELL: In her 61 years on the throne, the Queen has never publicly uttered the words lesbian or gay. She is a patron of hundreds of charities but none of them are gay ones. Never once has she visited or supported a gay charity. In truth, the Commonwealth Charter does not include any specific rejection of discrimination based on sexual orientation. This was vetoed by the homophobic majority of member states. [...]

While I doubt that Elizabeth II is a raging homophobe, she certainly doesn’t appear to be gay-friendly. Not once during her reign has she publicly acknowledged the existence of the LGBT community… Astonishingly, since she became Queen in 1952, the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ have never publicly passed her lips. There is no record of her ever speaking them. Even when she announced government plans for gay law reform in her Queen’s Speeches, she did not use the words lesbian or gay. Apparently, mentioning LGBT people is beneath the dignity of the monarch.

The Guardian’s Patrick Strudwick similarly notes that “to refrain from specification is to collude with silence, the Grand Pause that keeps lesbians and gay men invisible, suffocating in marriages of inconvenience or trapped in police cells.”

The charter is a worthwhile commitment to civil rights in commonwealth countries and also includes support for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Still, claims that The Queen is suddenly “fighting” for gay rights seems to be quite the overstatement.

Mark Regnerus

Mark Regnerus has admitted his “family structures” study didn’t actually measure gay parenting, comparing the children of separated parents who had same-sex relationships with those of married opposite-sex parents. An internal auditor of the journal that published the Regnerus study last year concluded its findings were “bullshit” because this false comparison doesn’t adequately measure same-sex parenting. Nevertheless, conservatives have repeatedly cited the study, even to the Supreme Court, claiming same-sex couples are unfit to raise children to substantiate their opposition to marriage equality, even though medical professionals have thoroughly debunked its claims. Now, documents reveal that the anti-gay conservatives who originally funded the study conspired before data was even collected to produce results that could influence “major decisions of the Supreme Court.”

The American Independent collected internal documents through public-records requests from the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute, which funded the Regnerus study, and found that its president intended the study to produce a result against gay parenting before it was even conducted. This is not surprising, as both the Witherspoon Institute, as well as the study’s other funder, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, are connected to Robert George, founding co-chair of the National Organization for Marriage and prominent legal opponent of marriage equality. Now these emails confirm that suspicion.

For example, the University of Texas hired academic consultant W. Bradford Wilcox to conduct data analysis on the Regnerus study, ignoring that he was a longtime fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and was still working with Witherspoon while the study was conceptualized. Regnerus reached out to Wilcox back in September of 2010 for input about “their hopes for what emerges from this project.” Wilcox also suggested the study be pitched to the journal Social Science Research, where Wilcox sits on the editorial advisory board.
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