He loves gays. He loves them not. He loves gays. He loves them not. Just like all the other republican presidential candidates, Tommy Thompson is having a hard time deciding.

During the Republican Presidential Candidate Debate he was asked "If a private employer finds homosexuality immoral, should he be allowed to fire a gay worker?"

Thompson replied: "I think that is left to the individual business. I really sincerely believe that that is an issue that business people have got to make their own determination as to whether or not they should be."

But after the debate he did a quick flip-flop. He stated during an interview "I did not hear the question properly. There should be no discrimination whatsoever in America. And nobody should be able to discriminate against any individual on sex or on their occupation. What I really meant to say and should have said more poignantly is that this should be left up to the states. States should have the opportunity of regulating individual hiring and firing. And it should not be a federal law at that particular point in time"

It seems all the Republican candidates, many of whom (Giuliani, McCain, Romney) have been supportive of LGBT equality in the past, are having a hard time figuring out how anti-gay they need to become to win the Republican nomination. The new gay-wedge issue of basic fairness and equality is going to to continue to follow these candidates through the primary, and the anti-gay things that are said now will surely come back to haunt whoever wins the nomination. The rest of the country is, after-all, much more fair-minded than the Republican base.