Tag: gay marriage

Colorado Republican Reps. Doug Lamborn and Mike Coffman joined Rep. Michele Bachmann and 83 other members of the House as signers of a letter to the U.S. Senate urging that body to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit gay members of America’s Armed Forces from using military facilities for marriage ceremonies.

On a conference call with supporters of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom coalition on Tuesday evening, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said she would reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, while agreeing with a caller who said allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military would “destroy the armed forces.”

She has been a fierce presence in the trenches of national culture wars over the past few years but now Maggie Gallagher, National Organization for Marriage co-founder and chairman of the board, is stepping down. NOM announced Gallagher will be replaced by John Eastman, legal defender of social conservative causes, former Clarence Thomas Supreme Court clerk and Dean of Chapman University Law School in California.

While gay soldiers and veterans in Colorado react today with a mix of joy and relief that the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy barring them from serving openly has been repealed, Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family continues to express concerns. The Christian-right group's political-action news outlet, CitizenLink, worries that repeal might impinge on soldiers' freedom of religion and expression and that it could also further erode the shaky standing of the Defense of Marriage Act, which precludes federal recognition of same-sex unions.

The grassroots political dream crashed, like so many others, on the shoals of big-bucks ballot-initiative finances. Mark Olmstead, a 19-year-old Colorado voter, was spurred earlier this year by high-profile gay rights advances and increasing popular support for gay rights to try to land an initiative on the ballot in Colorado that would repeal the state's ban on gay marriage. Nic Garcia at Out Front Colorado reports today that Olmstead decided to withdrawal his initiative after failing to win backing for the business of gathering roughly 100,000 signatures by January.

Rick Santorum discusses why no Catholic has ever received the Republican nomination for president and rails against marriage equality.

Colorado U.S. Senator Mark Udall at a gay-rights event this weekend in Denver said he supports marriage equality for all Americans. Udall joins a growing list of lawmakers who have gone on record in support of ending the era where the federal Defense of Marriage Act and where constitutional bans like Colorado's Amendment 43 blocked LGBT couples from the legal protections and advantages provided by the state through marriage. Udall is the 18th sitting U.S. Senator to state publicly that he supports efforts to make gay marriage legal.

Rep. Michele Bachmann was grilled by the hosts of several Sunday morning talk shows about her views on gay and lesbian Americans. When pressed about her past statements about LGBT issues, she repeated “I am running for the presidency of the United States,” several times in lieu of answering the question. “I’m not anyone’s judge.”

At a campaign stop in Iowa on Friday, a member of the audience grilled Tim Pawlenty on his views about rights for LGBT people. Gabe Aderhold, a senior at Edina High School, asked Pawlenty why he has “not had the courage to stand for me and my friends. You are discriminating against me and it hurts.” Pawlenty said he will never be at the point “where I’ll say that every domestic relationship is the same as traditional marriage.”

Survey results released by Public Policy Polling this week underline broad support in Colorado for some form of legislation that would grant gay couples equal partnership rights. Although Republican members of the House Judicial Committee last year quashed a popular civil unions bill, PPP found that even among Colorado Republican voters, support for civil unions-style legislation is now nearing 60 percent.