Rick Santorum's surge to second in Iowa sent his religious right devotees over the moon and left his LGBT detractors dismayed.
Santorum's fifth place finish in New Hampshire on Jan. 10 didn't diminish the attention devoted to the most ardent Christian right candidate in the race for the GOP nomination.
"His bona fides as a religious right leader are unquestionable. But Rick Santorum isn't just close to traditional religious right organizations and activists: the former Pennsylvania senator also has ties to even the most fringe parts of the movement," reported the Right Wing Watch.
In the Iowa Caucuses on Jan. 3, Mitt Romney took first place just eight votes ahead of Santorum. Ron Paul, largely with the support of independent and younger voters, placed third, followed at a greater distance by Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann.
Bachmann only bested Jon Huntsman, who had opted to focus on New Hampshire instead of Iowa, and Herman Cain, who quit the race weeks before the voting.
A special election in Iowa on Nov. 8 provided a big victory for marriage equality in the state by allowing Democrats to maintain their narrow 26-24 majority in the Senate.
Democrat Liz Mathis won a Senate seat in a Republican-leaning district by a margin of 55 to 43, defeating right-wing Republican Cindy Golding, who received strong backing from the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage.
Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold today endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Warren is fighting to take back the seat that Republican Scott Brown picked up following Ted Kennedy’s death in 2009.
Saying a near death experience while serving in Iraq changed his mind on the issue, Minnesota Representative John Kriesel criticized his fellow House Republicans Saturday for their plan to vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
In urging lawmakers to reject the measure, Kriesel said his experience in Iraq affected how he viewed many things in life, including gay and lesbian relationships. He said Republicans are wrong to interfere in the private lives of Minnesotans.
Virginia elected its first openly gay senator, Democrat Adam Ebbin, in a district that encompasses a swath of suburban Washington, D.C., making him one of more than 50 LGBT candidates elected to office in the Nov. 8 election.
Although the election is more than a year away, Tammy Baldwin is the current Democratic frontrunner in what is destined to be a fiercely competitive race for retiring Herb Kohl’s U.S. Senate seat.
U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin is seriously considering a run for the Senate seat that’s being vacated by retiring Sen. Herb Kohl, putting her on track to possibly become the nation’s first openly gay U.S. senator.
New York’s largest Spanish-language daily newspaper came out in favor of same-sex marriage in a May 4 editorial.
The editorial is a response to an unprecedented push to legalize gay marriage in the state, led by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who says it’s an issue of fairness.
President Barack Obama did not stake out any new positions during a speech Oct. 1 to the members of the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights groups. But the president did take on the Republicans who want his job, rebuking the candidates who did not defend a gay servicemember booed by the audience at a recent debate in Florida.
A political group that promotes the corporate interests of billionaire David Koch has begun phone bank operations on behalf of Republican state senators targeted for recall in Wisconsin.
State Rep. Sandy Pasch decided to run for public office several years ago while listening to a public radio report about what was happening at the Capitol. The big topics on the legislative agenda of the day were enacting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and deciding whether to call the Christmas tree at the Capitol a “holiday tree.”