Dr. Ben Carson, the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and rising Republican star, announced Wednesday that he will no longer be speaking at the commencement for Johns Hopkins School of Medicine after making some inflammatory comments about gay marriage. On a Fox News appearance, Carson compared gay marriage to bestiality and pedophilia.

Last night at a fundraising gala for the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Amy Pascal appealed to her Hollywood industry colleagues about some specific word choices:

Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican and a top contender for the party's vice-presidential candidacy last year, has come out in support of gay marriage—after his son, Will, came out as gay. "As a congressman, and more recently as a senator, I opposed marriage for same-sex couples," Portman writes in an editorial published today in the Columbus Dispatch. "Then something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way." In 2011 Will, then in his first year at Yale, told his parents that he is gay. That knowledge, Portman writes, "prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective."

With a narrow 5-4 vote, Puerto Rico's Supreme Court continues to ban gay couples from adopting children. The vote weighed in on an individual case, involving an unnamed woman who attempted to adopt the child of her partner. Her partner had had in-vitro fertilization to conceive the child.

You may remember American Idol season three winner Fantasia Barrino from winning the third season of American Idol. What you may not know is that Fantasia isn't really cool with gay marriage — and she took to Instagram to let everyone know while also working out her own persecution complex. The image has been deleted, but here's the text:

Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere are suing an anti-gay group called Public Advocate of the United States for using the couple's engagement photo in a homophobic advertisement. The photo, which was altered, was taken from the couple's website and used in a political campaign against Colorado State Senator Jean White, a Republican who supports gay unions.

The Civil Rights Agenda (TCRA), a Chicago-based gay advocacy organization, issued a press release late yesterday alleging that conservative fast-food chain Chick-fil-A has promised to stop funding anti-gay organizations.

Speaking with CNN's Brooke Baldwin on this morning's Starting Point, the Republican Virginia delegate who successfully rallied his party to oppose the appointment of gay Richmond prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland to General District Court judge said he didn't see the parallels between previous rights movements and the gay rights movement because "sodomy is not a civil right."

U.S. Secretary of Education and Chief Presidential Basketball Guy Arne Duncan endorsed marriage equality on Monday morning, telling Mark Halperin on Morning Joe that "yes," he believes gay men and women should be allowed to marry. (Not each other: you know what I mean, though.)

If they gave a Pulitzer Prize for waffling, this piece from the Washington City Paper last week might have won it. In it, food editor Chris Shott spends several hundred words pondering whether a person who is not a homophobe can in good conscience eat at Chick-fil-A, the Atlanta-based fast-food chain and purveyor of those dumbass cow ads. Chick-fil-A's nonprofit arm, the WinShape Foundation, has for years donated millions to anti-gay Christian groups like Focus on the Family, which once warned Americans, "[T]he homosexual agenda is a beast."

From the Facebook page of fearless Gawker overlord Nick Denton, a suggestion for a gay-rights campaign:

We loathe a lot of people here at Gawker, mostly because we recognize that humanity is irreversibly doomed and the future holds nothing but Kim Kardashian dancing in six-inch stilettos on the graves of the poor. (Silver lining: Well-aerated grave grass.)

Last week, in the wake of a hot-and-heavy extramarital affair with a male staffer and multiple reprimands from her own Republican party, Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch apologized and resigned.

Oh Christ, someone on Team Romney is going to get fired today: Poor old Mittens was forced to talk to a human, one-on-one, with cameras rolling. And not just any human, but a gay one. Who was a veteran. In Vietnam. Which was a war. And so on. Yikes.

Here's a sweet Australian ad for—well, I don't want to ruin the surprise (you will probably be able to guess what's going to happen anyway), except to say that the United States could stand to see more campaigns like this.

A lot is changing on the gay rights landscape. The military - once a home for staunch homophobia - is now one of the more welcoming employers for openly gay people. Where the last Democratic president sat down and signed the Defense Of Marriage Act into law, the current Democratic president is on a mission to tear it down.

Southwest Airlines, the Official Airline of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, loves gay people. Just loves 'em! Unless they are doing gross gay stuff like gay-kissing their gay girlfriends on the plane, in which case, they are not allowed.

You know how Jay Leno's lips are always firmly planted on his guest's behind, no matter who it is? How publicists enamored with Leno's softball predictability are always eager to book their clients on The Tonight Show? And how Leno rarely, if ever, challenges the answers a guest provides to the questions he asks? Well, that changed on Friday night. How so? Two words: Michele Bachmann.

What is Michele Bachmann running for, again? "I'm running for the presidency of the United States," the Iowa straw poll winner helpfully clarified to Meet the Press host David Gregory on Sunday morning. "I'm not running to be anyone's judge." Except for, apparently, gay couples with kids, whom the congresswoman refused to describe as "families." But stop asking Michele Bachmann about that! This isn't "what people are concerned about right now"! Even though it is, according to Michele Bachmann, "the defining political issue of our time."

Laura Fotusky, clerk of rural Barker, N.Y., quit her post on Tuesday rather than grant marriage licenses to gay folks. She would probably had more fun staying and being really judge-y with the marrying gays, but, well, God hates gay marriage! (She's posted her resignation letter here, if you really care.) Gay couples in the region are better off driving the hour to Niagra Falls anyway and going the whole nine yards with the honeymoon suite and everything. In any event—Laura—really—we mean this—don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. [Politico; image, not of Barker, and not of Fotusky, via Shutterstock]