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In August of 2009, the American Psychological Association adopted the report of its Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation and urged mental health professionals to avoid telling their patients that sexual orientation can be changed (APA 2009a). The report examined the efficacy of "conversion therapies"—also called "reparative therapies"—wherein the patient and therapist attempt to change the sexual orientation of the patient from gay or lesbian to heterosexual. The report is over 160 pages and examines over 80 peer-reviewed, published studies spanning five decades of research. Despite the heft of the report, the findings are briefly and well summarized by the chair of the task force, Judith M. Glassgold, Psy.D.: "Contrary to the claims of sexual orientation change advocates and practitioners, there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation" (APA 2009b). Of course, this conclusion is a given among all but minor fringe elements in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) community or among this community's friends and affiliates. While sexuality collectively seems to present itself along a scale, it seems for individuals to become fixed at some point along that scale. The APA report provides a useful framework for considering the role of sexuality in political science and raises several important questions for political science as both an endeavor and a discipline.

In a two-party system, electoral capture refers to the political dilemma faced by a group that regularly votes overwhelmingly for one party while the other major party has no interest in competing for the group's votes (Frymer, 1999). In 2004, 11 states approved amendments to their state constitutions that banned same-sex marriages. The initiatives passed by wide margins that, except in Utah, exceeded the margin of victory for the winning presidential candidate in each state. The broad support for the anti-gay initiatives suggests the electoral capture of Gay and Lesbian Americans. [Copyright 2007 Elsevier Ltd.]

What explains the behavior of legislators on bills that restrict the rights of marginalized minorities? Studies of representation typically focus on factors like party or public opinion but seldom account for theories of minority representation like electoral capture or subconstituency politics. One reason for this is that data allowing for the comparison of these theories are seldom available for U.S. House districts. We overcome this hurdle by implementing multilevel regression with post-stratification to estimate opinion on gay marriage during the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act vote. We show that subconstituency politics explains legislators' behavior better than electoral capture, party, or public opinion.

Over the past half-century, students of democratic representation have investigated the extent to which elected officials act as their constituents prefer. Less attention has been paid to the fact that in addition to popular sovereignty, however, modern republican democracy is characterized by the values of liberty and equality. Democratic theorists suggest that these latter values should prevail in cases of conflict when the issue in question speaks to citizens' fundamental rights, as is the case with gay marriage. We examine this question of representation and responsiveness with respect to gay marriage, an issue of importance to the gay community—a small and intense group that struggles to achieve policy success. We find that neither majoritarian nor capture-based theories of representation fully account for the lack of elected official responsiveness to this particular constituent interest group. Instead, our evidence supports the theory of subconstituency politics. Consequently, we find little reason for optimism that legislation supporting gay marriage is likely to pass both because gay marriage is opposed by a competing subconstituency, Evangelical Christians, who are intense and larger in number and because the systemic design inhibits the ability of minority groups to succeed legislatively in the face of comparable minority opposition.