Tammy Baldwin for president!

Back in February the Arkansas Legislature passed a bill banning local non-discrimination protections for sexual minorities. About the same time the city of Eureka Springs approved what the state law banned. An anti-gay group gathered enough signatures to put the city's ordinance up for a vote of the citizens. That vote was Tuesday and 71% of the voters want to keep protections for sexual minorities. So the city will enforce their ordinance – until July 20 when the state law goes into effect.



A new poll by the Pew Research Center shows that since 2007 the number of adults calling themselves Christian has dropped by about 5 million, or a drop of almost 8% of adults. All denominations are affected, though Evangelical Protestant dropped less than Catholic and Mainline Protestant. In contrast, the number of those unaffiliated with a church has risen. Among adults under 35 – the Millennials – the rise is indicating a religiously unaffiliated generation. Many are saying the reason is a political backlash against the GOP and their religious conservative backers.



In another new poll, this one by the Wall Street Journal and NBC:

found 61 percent of Americans would be enthusiastic about or comfortable with a gay or lesbian presidential candidate. In comparison, 52 percent said they'd be enthusiastic about or comfortable with an evangelical Christian running for president.

Yup, Tammy Baldwin over Mike Huckabee.



I've mentioned the extremely flawed and discredited study by Mark Regnerus that was declared unbelievable when it appeared in the Michigan same-sex marriage case a year ago. Two sociologists went through the study's data. They removed the suspect stuff (such as the person who claimed to be 7-foot-8 and 88 pounds), and corrected the methodological errors. They recomputed all the conclusions and – surprise! – all that data showed that "adult children who lived with same-sex parents show comparable outcome profiles to those from other family types, including intact biological families." Quite the opposite of the conclusion Regnerus computed. This corrected study will appear in Social Science Research, the same journal that published the original.