Rob Portman's views on the issues of the day still bode quite ill and ugly for modern culture as a whole. Until now. Until, I'm guessing, just this once.

You could imagine my shock a few evenings after the election when, at a friend's party, someone was introduced to me thus: "This is Mark. He's a gay Republican. He supported Romney." I was so shocked by his political views that I had to excuse myself and walk away.

Had the Log Cabin Republicans not endorsed Romney, they would now have more pull within the GOP. They would be able to tell GOP leaders, in the midst of the handwringing over the party's "demographic problem," that had Romney backed off his harsh line on gay rights, they could have helped him win.

The Republican Party must face a lesson with important human consequences: It cannot deny rights and attention to LGBT, female and minority communities if it wishes to remain a mainstream presence in American politics.

Supporters of Romney are now trying desperately to spin his lack of moral certainty as a good thing. The argument for Romney has become: "You don't like this current Romney? Don't worry, he'll change into whatever you want after the election and be great! Trust us!"

You know the one-dimensional friends who show up in your Facebook timeline and their posts are always about the same subject matter? I have become one of these one-dimensional people, and I can't stand it.

We have a week left. Share your feelings with those who love you, and ask that they do the right thing. Tell them that the future they think Romney will give them comes at a cost, sadly. And it might not be their friends but their very children who ask for their money back.

Why are we mad? Because for too long LGBT people in our society have been stripped of simple dignity and decency. We have been denied all the things that we are supposed to deserve in a country based on "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

There is simply no logical basis whatsoever for arguing that voting for Republicans this year is a good way to advance LGBT legal equality. Yet the Log Cabin Republicans argue exactly that. Given the stakes for our rights in this election, it is important to examine their rationale.

The night before the Republican National Convention began in Tampa last month, a group of gay Republicans sipped wine and ate crab cakes at the Rusty ...

When President Barack Obama told the nation last week that he supports same-sex marriage, I wanted to believe that his announcement was merely a communication error. This is something I wanted my party, the Republican Party, to be the first to make progress on.

Between the two parties, Democrats are the clear choice if a voter considers gay rights an important issue. The reality we must embrace, though, is that we need Republicans to pass federal protections.

Gay Republicans want to believe they can recapture what their party "used to be," recover their rosy view of what a formerly great institution once stood for. But to stay, they are forced (well, no one is forcing them) to accept delusion or outright rejection as the price of staying.

Americans "have a constitutional right to be gay." So said Barry Goldwater, the 1964 right-wing Republican presidential candidate, in 1994. How the Republican Party has changed. Indeed, how the GOP changed goes a long way toward explaining America's national political delirium.

Dear gay Republicans: Rick Santorum's surge and near-win in Iowa should be a wake-up call: your party hates you. I don't understand how you can look beyond the fact that a major portion of your party's fundamental beliefs are that you are not equal.

Until the stateside Republican Party can learn from the U.K.'s Conservative Party regarding LGBT equality, there is little hope that it will ever be able to pass itself off as a proper English lady. And we shouldn't treat it like one, either.

Whether it's Republicans in Congress, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, or organizations like the FRC and AFA, people are advancing dangerous and outdated ideas that don't reflect the values of mainstream Americans.