Kline is pushing back against efforts to regulate the industry, which is being investigated by 10 state attorney generals.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights sent a letter to the Anoka Hennepin School District on Tuesday demanding that the school district abandon its “neutrality policy,” which bars discussion of LGBT issues in district schools, and step up efforts to address bullying and harassment.
As expected, Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed all budget bills Tuesday that were submitted by the Republicans. His message to the GOP: “Compromise.” Dayton also hit Republicans for including divisive social issues in their budgets.
Sixty-three current and former law school faculty members from the University of Minnesota signed an open letter to state legislators on Wednesday urging them to vote against a bill that would put an anti-gay marriage question on the 2012 ballot. The lawyers said the constitutional amendment would “cement the existing hardships” that gay and lesbian families now face and cause costly legal fights for the state down the road.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota is demanding that the Northfield School District stop filtering LGBT internet content on the district’s computers. Calling it unconstitutional, the group sent a letter to the district calling for a halt to the filtering as well as a data practices request to identify how the filters got put into place. The move is part of the ACLU’s broader “Don’t Filter Me” project to prevent filtering of LGBT content.
As Republicans and the Obama administration seek cuts to the Pell Grant system, a new federal tracking system shows that student loan defaults are on the rise. For students who began repaying their loans in 2008, 13.8 percent have since defaulted. For-profit institutions had 25 percent of their graduates defaulting after three years, while public four-year colleges had 10.8 percent of their graduates defaulting after three years.
Two 14-year old girls committed suicide last week in Marshall, Minn., and the evidence suggests they’d been bullied. Relatives of Haylee Fentress and Paige Moravetz told Meredith Viera of the TODAY Show that the girls may have been more than just friends. Fentress had hyphenated her last name on Facebook to include Moravetz’s last name, and Fentress had been expelled from school recently for defending Paige in a fight. The pair’s deaths add to a growing list of suicides in Minnesota and around the country where bullying is suspected to have played a factor.
“I stand with you,” was the message Gov. Mark Dayton had for LGBT advocates on Thursday afternoon at OutFront Minnesota’s LGBT Lobby Day at the Minnesota Capitol. Dayton was the first sitting governor to address the annual rally, which has been held for more than a decade. Dayton said he will block any efforts to curtail LGBT equality.
The national religious right legal group Alliance Defense Fund filed suit in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota last week on behalf of a student who is trying to form an anti-abortion rights group at the St. Michael-Albertville High School. The All Life Is Valuable (ALIV) Club was denied permission to become an “officially recognized club” because school administrators said it didn’t “support the student body as a whole.”
On Tuesday, Minnesota Senators debated whether taxpayer funds should be used to pay for private religious school tuition as part of an omnibus tax bill. Republicans hope the proposal, which is modeled after one in Arizona and has been dubbed a “backdoor voucher” system by some, will pass constitutional muster. The U.S. Supreme Court released a decision on Arizona’s system on Monday that could boost state Republicans’ hopes, but DFLers say regardless of the measure’s constitutionality it represents the GOP’s ultimate goal of “dismantling” public education altogether.
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