The son of Rob Portman is defending his father against critics who wonder why the Ohio Republican Senator waited two years after learning his son was gay to publicly support gay marriage.

'Part of the reason for that is that it took time for him to think through the issue more deeply after the impetus of my coming out. But another factor was my reluctance to make my personal life public,' Will Portman writes in a guest column for the Yale Daily News.

Republican Senator Rob Portman, once a vocal critic of same-sex marriage and one of the top picks to run for Vice President of the United States alongside Mitt Romney, has publicly announced a change of heart on the issue.

Portman changed his mind after his son Will came out to him and his wife Jane.

‘I'm announcing today a change of heart on an issue that a lot of people feel strongly about that has to do with gay couples' opportunity to marry,’ Portman told CNN.

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is making clear that his opposition to gay marriage is not a position he took simply to secure votes from the hard right wing of his party.

With his loss to President Barack Obama four months behind him, Romney has reiterated his anti-gay marriage stance.

Former Utah governor and contender to be the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has announced his support for marriage equality just months after another contender declared same-sex marriage to be inevitable

Huntsman made the announcement via a February 21 op-ed in the American Conservative magazine.

‘While serving as governor of Utah, I pushed for civil unions and expanded reciprocal benefits for gay citizens,’ Huntsman wrote.

From all indications, Chuck Hagel will be nominated by President Barack Obama to be the new head of the Defense Department. According to the New York Times, Obama could make the announcement as early as next week.

The leading LGBT military family advocacy organization, OutServe-SLDN, is prepared with a to-do-list for Hagel.

In the weeks leading up to the Us presiential election last month, the Log Cabin Republicans endorsed Republican Mitt Romney despite the candidate's staunch views against gay marriage.

Nate Silver, the most unlikely political superstar to emerge from last month's US presidential election, was announced as Out Magazine's inaugural Person of the Year on Tuesday (18 December).

Silver who predicted, with uncanny accuracy, how Barack Obama would defeat Mitt Romney.

He made his prediction - 90.9 percent certainty of an Obama win - months before an election that most experts were saying was too close to call even on the morning of the vote.

Movie superstar Brad Pitt has stood by his mom despite her slamming marriage equality and campaigning against President Barack Obama.

Jane Pitt shocked the Hollywood A-lister's fans after she wrote an anti-gay marriage letter to a newspaper urging voters to back Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the US elections.

However, the Killing Me Softly star insists there is no bad blood between him and his mother, despite the odd dinner table debate.

Wanda Sykes stopped by The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to weigh in on the US presidential elections earlier this month that saw Democrat Barack Obama beat Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

'This was an ugly election,' said the outspoken comic who often includes political material in her act. 'Either you're gloating or you're pounding.'

Sykes couldn't help but poke fun at Romney who post-election told his financial donors that Obama won the 2012 election because of 'gifts' he gave to black, Hispanic and young voters.

The most unlikely political superstar to emerge from this month's US presidential election is Nate Silver who predicted, with uncanny accuracy, how Barack Obama would defeat Mitt Romney.

He made his prediction - 90.9 percent certainty of an Obama win - months before an election that most experts were saying was too close to call even on the morning of the vote.

Silver, who is openly gay, also correctly predicted the electoral college results in 50 out of 50 states.

Since President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney received roughly the same amount of votes - 49 percent - of straight people in last week's presidential election but Obama got more than three times the number of votes from gay voters.

Exit polls showed that 76 percent of voters who identified as gay supported Obama while 22 percent supported Romney, according to a Gallup survey conducted in conjunction with Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Two leading US conservative pundits have suggested that a different Republican stance on LGBT rights could have won them the US presidency.

Fox News contributor Ellen Ratner crunched the numbers and found that if Republican candidate Mitt Romney had managed to garner even 48 percent of the LGBT vote in Ohio he would have carried the key state.