Iowa
The fallout from GOP candidates’ attendance at a “religious liberty” conference in Iowa continued last week. Right Wing Watch notes that conference organizer Kevin Swanson has repeatedly defended the death penalty for homosexuality:

When three Republican presidential candidates decided to address a conference in Iowa this weekend organized by Colorado pastor Kevin Swanson — a radical activist who thinks that Girl Scout cookies and the movie “Frozen” are turning girls into lesbians and has defended the death penalty for homosexuality — it showed once again that the Republican primary seems to be a competition of who can move farther to the right.
Swanson cleverly focused his Iowa conference on the theme of “religious liberties,”warning that “persecution against Christians is on the rise in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, China, Oregon, and Kentucky.” It was apparently an invitation that Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal — who are constantly harping on the theme that American Christians are on the road to facing persecution on par with Christians living under oppressive regimes — couldn’t pass up.
Swanson made clear what he meant by anti-Christian persecution in interview at the conference with Seattle-based radio host Michelle Mendoza, when he complained that media reports on his anti-gay comments, including his recent remarks that AIDS is “God’s retribution” for homosexuality, is part of a larger attempt to “shut down Christian media.”

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow devoted a segment to the conference and Swanson, the Advocate reports:

Rachel Maddow focused Monday night on a tale of two forums this past weekend: one she hosted in South Carolina featuring the three major contenders for the Democratic party nomination, and an Iowa conference featuring three antigay Republican candidates for president hosted by a right wing pastor who declared “it’s not a gay time!”
“It really was a ‘kill the gays’ call to arms,” said Maddow on her MSNBC program.

The New York Times published an opinion piece taking aim at Swanson:

EARLIER this month, in Des Moines, the prominent home-schooling advocate and pastor Kevin Swanson again called for the punishment of homosexuality by death. To be clear, he added that the time for eliminating America’s gay population was “not yet” at hand. We must wait for the nation to embrace the one true religion, he suggested, and gay people must be allowed to repent and convert.

Mr. Huckabee later pleaded ignorance. Yet a quick web search will turn up Mr. Swanson’s references to the demonic power of “the homosexual Borg,” the unmitigated evil of Harry Potter and the Disney character Princess Elsa’s lesbian agenda….
Mr. Cruz apparently felt little need to make excuses. He was accompanying another of the featured speakers at the conference: his father, Rafael Cruz — a politically connected pastor who told a 2013 Family Leadership Summit that same-sex marriage was a government plot to destroy the family.

A business that closed last year after getting sued for refusing to serve gay and lesbian couples has been transformed into a church, the Christian Examiner reports:

A building that once housed an Iowa gift shop and bistro at the center of a religious liberty battle reopened earlier this month—as a church.
After the owners of the former Gautz Haus Gallery in Grimes, Iowa, sold the building to their church, Harvest Bible Chapel, last summer, the pastor says the new space has already spurred growth in the brief time they’ve owned it.
“We’ve grown significantly in the last few weeks because of the building,” Ryan Jorgenson, the church’s pastor, told the Christian Examiner. “A building isn’t everything, but the right building is a lot.”
In the past two years the church has met in a variety of locations yet has never been able to put up permanent signage to let people know about the church. The church also no longer has to tear down and set up its worship space each week. The congregation bought the property in July and spent September and October renovating it. The first worship service was held at the venue on Nov. 1.

Meagan Taylor is getting help from the ACLU in suing the hotel that had her arrested, the Guardian reports:

A transgender woman was jailed for eight days after staff at the hotel where she was staying with a friend called the police to report two “men dressed like women” were engaging in prostitution, according to a complaint filed by the ACLU on Tuesday.
Last July, Meagan Taylor and her friend, both black transgender women, spent the night at the Drury Inn in West Des Moines, Iowa, on their way to Kansas City for a funeral. But Taylor ended up spending the next eight days in a county jail for possessing her hormone drugs without a copy of her prescription, according to the ACLU’s complaint.
After the women checked into their room, staff called police to report that they suspected the two hotel guests, described as “men dressed like women”, were engaging in prostitution, according to the lawsuit. The next morning, the women were woken up by loud bangs on the door.
The lawsuit alleges that the Drury Inn discriminated against Taylor based on her gender identity and race, a violation of state law which defines gender identity as “a gender-related identity of a person, regardless of the person’s assigned sex at birth”.

Radio Iowa has more details on the lawsuit:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit in Iowa on behalf of a black transgender woman from St. Louis.
Rita Bettis, legal director for the ACLU of Iowa, says 22-year-old Meagan Taylor traveled with a friend to West Des Moines in July to attend a funeral. The lawsuit against the Drury Inn hotel contends Taylor was discriminated against based on her gender and race.
“The staff at the Drury called West Des Moines Police to report they’re suspicious that there’s prostitution going on because there are ‘two men dressed as women’ who checked into the hotel,” Bettis said. Taylor was arrested for possessing hormone pills without a prescription. She was held in the Polk County Jail for 8 days before the charges were dropped.
“She was unable to attend her best friend’s brother’s funeral that was so important to her…and of course, underwent this harmful, painful experience of being discriminated against based just on who she is,” Bettis said.

Caitlyn Jenner made a surprise visit to Dubuque on Friday, KWWL reports:

It’s a night of celebration with a surprise special appearance in Dubuque by reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner.
“The people we have here today come from all walks of the LGBT community, not only them, but we have our allies and our supporters,” said founder of Dubuque Transgender, Rachael Ferraro.
Known to many as an Olympic champ, Jenner rolled into town with her entourage of friends and film crew.
It’s for “An Evening with the Stars,” an event held at the Riverboat Lounge to raise awareness about the trans community in Dubuque.
“Caitlyn is probably the most well-known transgender person on the planet. To get your point across, to people who aren’t aware of transgender people in the transgender community here locally, it was a big help for us,” added Ferraro.

Wisconsin
In Wisconsin, debate continues over a proposed bill that would prohibit schools from implementing transgender-inclusive policies. The Badger Herald sharply criticized Republicans for putting forward the bill:

Wisconsin Republicans have proposed a dangerous bill that would remove gender neutral bathrooms and changing rooms from K-12 schools around Wisconsin. This is a gross attempt to legitimize transphobic ideologies and invalidate transgender students’ identities.

If passed, the bill would prohibit allowing transgender males or females from using the bathrooms they identify with.
The bill also permits local school boards to “provide reasonable accommodations to a pupil to use a single-occupancy changing room” when a transgender student or the student’s parents requests that they receive this accommodation. How truly sweet of the lawmakers.

Meanwhile, anti-LGBT group Wisconsin Family Action has ramped up its promotion of the bill, calling transgender-inclusion a “War on Children“:

“Dear parents, when you vote next November, please remember which party wants your daughters to share their school locker rooms and showers with boys.
That’s right, the Obama administration’s Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) recently ruled that Township High School District 211 in Palatine, Illinois must give a transgender kid, who was born a male and still has the private parts to prove it, unrestricted access to the girls’ facilities or they lose millions in federal funding.”
Read the rest of this “letter” HERE.
“Our bill in Wisconsin, AB 469, is designed to directly address this issue,” says Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, “Why should 99.7% of the students be asked to relinquish their privacy rights for these very few, when a single-occupancy facility takes care of the situation? Obama and his henchmen are trying to destroy our children, which reminds me that while there is no war on women, there is very definitely a war on CHILDREN.
“By the way, no federal court has said schools must bow the knee to the government on this issue,” Appling adds.

The Milwaukee Courier reports on a disparate HIV infection rate among African Americans in the city:

“Of the roughly 3,500 people with HIV in Milwaukee, 55 percent are African- American,” said Bill Keaton, executive director of the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin.
However, Keaton said HIV/AIDS is manageable with healthcare access, and that is why the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin partners with Black Health Coalition, Monroe Inc., and more to provide multicultural outreach on HIV and AIDS prevention.
Charles Smart, executive director of Monroe Inc. and Project Q program manager at the Milwaukee LGBT Community Resource Center, is highly familiar with the HIV and AIDS epidemic among African- Americans.
“The CDC did a study in 2009, showing one out of three African-American gay men are HIV positive and don’t know it,” he said.

North Dakota
Writer Hailey Colbrunn for the NDSU Spectrum urges North Dakota to enact a LGBT nondiscrimination policy:

In a state lacking legislation against discrimination based on sexual orientation, North Dakota State is a bastion of protections.
The university was the first North Dakota University System institution to offer protections against discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation. Despite the campus’s non-discrimination action, North Dakota does not offer such protections.
The state legislature struck down a spring senate bill banning discriminatory action against LGBT individuals in regard to housing, government services and the workplace.
According to S.B. 2279, “sexual orientation” means “actual or perceived heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality, or gender identity,” while gender identity is defined as “actual or perceived gender-related identity, appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated gender at birth.”
The bill was approved by the Senate and was brought to the floor of the House where it was killed in a 56-35 vote.
This move in April was the third time in six years that North Dakota’s legislature has killed legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.