Wisconsin

The Green Bay Packers have joined the Wisconsin LGBT Chamber of Commerce, CBS Sports reports:

The Green Bay Packers are now members of a strong community.
According to Richard Ryman of PackersNews.com. the Packers are now members of the Wisconsin LGBT Chamber of Commerce. This means the Packers will receive a listing in the chamber’s online directory, be allowed to post positions on the chamber’s job board and have a seat in the leadership advisory council.
The Packers look to make it three wins in a row when they face the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday. Make sure you’re in the loop – take five seconds to Sign up for our FREE Packers newsletter now!
The Wisconsin LGBT Chamber of Commerce is a organizations for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and LGBT-allied business and professionals.
“The Green Bay Packers are deeply committed to building an inclusive fan experience that engages all of our fans,” said Packers President and CEO Mark Murphy.
In 2014, the Wisconsin LGBT Chamber of Commerce was awarded the National Rising Star Chamber Award at the annual conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2013, the Chamber was the recipient of the Excellence in Community Impact Award according to its website.

Wisconsin State Journal columnist Chris Rickert notes that a state commission report on families and marriage leaves out an entire segment of married people in the state: same-sex couples.

That said, there’s a gaping hole in the commission’s 97-page report that undermines the notion that if government is going to involve itself in the welfare of families generally, it can’t pick and choose among families specifically.
Gay husbands, wives and parents might benefit from many of the recommendations in the commission’s report. But they also might not, given the exigencies of reproductive biology and longstanding cultural biases against gay marriage and parenting that can make gay family creation more stressful and difficult that its straight counterpart.
You’d never know this from the report, though, which doesn’t include any reference to same-sex marriage or gay parenting that I could find.
You’d think that if the state is going to spend a lot of time on, say, incarcerated spouses and parents, gay people who aren’t criminals would at least get a shout-out.

South Dakota
Human Rights Watch, an international group that monitors human rights, released a report on LGBT rights across the United States, using South Dakota as an example, the Argus Leader reports:

An international human rights watchdog organization said it wants to make South Dakota an example in the national debate on LGBT rights.
Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit human rights organization, released a 115-page report Wednesday in Sioux Falls outlining the challenges that LGBT students face. The group is going on the offensive in hopes of convincing lawmakers across the country to approve special protections against bullying and harassment in schools.
Ryan Thoreson, a spokesman for the group’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights program, told Argus Leader Media that he hopes the example set by Gov. Dennis Daugaard in vetoing a so-called transgender bathroom bill will be mirrored across the country.
“Our hope is that, like in South Dakota last year, the stories of the people who will be affected float to the top,” Thoreson said. “Hopefully it will be the beginning of a larger conversation and hopefully people will see that these kids already have too much to deal with.”

The Associated Press reports that the study found hostile environments for LGBT youth in public schools:

Many public schools are still hostile environments for LGBT students, an international human rights organization concluded in a report released Wednesday.
The lengthy report from Human Rights Watch was based on interviews primarily with current and former high school students, parents, administrators and teachers in Alabama, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Utah. It documented several challenges lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender students face, including in-person and online bullying, limits on LGBT student groups, exclusion of some topics from curricula and discrimination by classmates and school personnel.
“In every state we visited, we heard stories of students who were insulted, cyber-bullied or attacked, and teachers who allowed discrimination and harassment because they see it as normal behavior,” said Ryan Thoreson, a fellow in the nonprofit’s LGBT Rights Program.
Thoreson said the five states provided a regionally representative and legally diverse sample.
Thirty-one states, including the five in the report, have not enacted laws to specifically protect against bullying on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the report. While some districts and schools in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah have worked on comprehensive bullying policies, administrators in South Dakota cannot because of a state law that prohibits school districts from naming any protected classes of students in such policies.

South Dakota Public Radio included a segment on the report.

The Dakota Free Press said the report requires South Dakotans to confront anti-LGBT bullying:

Our state constitution says our public schools shall be “equally open to all.” If our schools aren’t equally open to LGBT South Dakotans, those don’t just have a hard time learning; they have a hard time living.
Dare I say that if you call yourself “pro-life”, you have to oppose bullying of LGBT students?
South Dakota passed a law in 2012 requiring every school to enact an anti-bullying policy. However, Human Rights Watch notes that our anti-bullying law, SDCL 13-32-14, includes a clause prohibiting schools from naming in its anti-bullying policy any “protected class of students.” I’d like to believe that just saying, “Don’t bully anyone, period,” is enough, but HRW points to research showing that “laws and policies that enumerate sexual orientation and gender identity as protected grounds are more effective than those that merely provide a general admonition against bullying.” There’s an irony in having to single out specific groups to protect them from bullying, but apparently we must call out LGBT-specific bullying to more effectively stop it.
Whatever your hangups about sex and gender, LGBT kids are still South Dakotans, just like the rest of us. They deserve a good education in a safe school. If we’re willing to put guns in classrooms to protect kids from a threat that happens less often than lightning, we should put policies in place to protect kids from bullying that happens every day.

Iowa
The Des Moines Register’s Rekha Basu checks in with a pastor who came out within the Methodist church and what the repercussions have been:

In June, the pastor in charge of the University of Iowa’s Wesley Foundation campus ministry preached a remarkable sermon to the Iowa United Methodist church’s annual conference in Des Moines. She told the 1,400 attendees she is “a self-avowed practicing homosexual,” or as Rev. Anna Blaedel preferred to put it, “I am out, queer, partnered clergy.” And she observed that just for saying that, she could be brought up on charges and lose her job.
Within 24 hours, three ministers had filed charges with the Iowa bishop against the 35-year-old Blaedel. They cited the church’s Book of Discipline, which calls the practice of homosexuality incompatible with Christian teachings.
But the book also implores families and churches “not to reject or condemn lesbian and gay members and friends,” and advocates human rights and civil liberties for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.
The Iowa bishop was Julius Trimble, who was on his way out after eight years here, for a routine reassignment to Indiana. He could have dismissed the charges, referred the case to the church council for a trial or sought a “just resolution,” between Blaedel and complainants: pastors Craig Peters, Gary Hoyt, and Ben Blanchard. Trimble opted to seek a resolution, though he was petitioned by 42 LGBTQ clergy members, mostly from Iowa, to drop the charges. He said he hoped, through a resolution, “to unite and find enough space to welcome all people, even those who disagree.”

An Iowa State Daily editorial takes a look at the controversy surrounding the cancellation of a speech by a gay white nationalist:

ISU Students 4 Trump, and other conservative forces on campus, would have students believe that their First Amendment rights are under assault by the tyrannical administration here at Iowa State University. The organization, which is not an official student group but rather a charter of the nationwide group Students 4 Trump, made national headlines after canceling a Milo Yiannopoulos event last week.
The event, originally scheduled for last Friday at the Memorial Union, was part of the alt-right troll and Breitbart News editor’s “Dangerous Faggot Tour.” It was canceled after the ISU Students 4 Trump, the organizers of the event, were saddled with a hefty security fee just a week before Yiannopoulos was to arrive.
ISU Students 4 Trump took this as a direct attack on not only conservative ideology, but free speech itself. Iowa State said in a statement in early December that, due to threats of violence at other universities where Yiannopoulos appeared, the security increases were necessary to ensure the safety of everyone involved.
Austin Giles, the president of ISU Students 4 Trump, said he’d already paid almost $1,000 to book a room in the Memorial Union for the event. Since ISU Students 4 Trump is not a student organization, it is required to pay full price to reserve rooms on campus. Shortly before the event, the university contacted Giles telling him that six ISU police officers would be necessary for security, coming with a price tag of almost $2,000.
“It’s ridiculous to say one week before the event, ‘Here’s $2,000 you need to pay,'” Giles said to KCCI. “We’re not going to let the university be a racketeer. ’Oh, it’s now more money.’ That’s abuse.”
Yet, censorship – which Yiannopoulos specifically accused Iowa State of perpetrating in his statement about the event’s cancellation – requires intent. If Iowa State purposefully waited until just a week before the event to apply the $2,000 security fee, fully knowing that no college student would be able to come up such an amount and as a backhanded attempt to restrict conservative speech and to push its leftist ideology, then as proponents of free speech, journalists everywhere should speak out.
However, there is no evidence to show that this wasn’t just a simple case of bureaucratic overlook, or a situation where the university looked at the reality of past Yiannopoulos events and decided that more security would be necessary, a step it is ethically obligated to take.

One Iowa praised Amerigroup’s decision to cover gender-affirming surgery for a transgender man, but noted that inequities in the health system for transgender people must be remedied:

Amerigroup, one of Iowa’s private Medicaid providers, agreed last month to cover gender-affirming surgery for Andrew Evans, a transgender Iowa man and client of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
While we are happy Evans will receive the surgery he needs, we realize that it means only one thing: Evans’ surgery will be covered. The Medicaid provider refused to acknowledge the medical necessity of the surgery, instead agreeing to coverage in order to “amicably resolve” the situation. In plain English, they didn’t want to tangle with the ACLU.
Exclusions for transgender surgery and other trans-related health care continue. Iowa’s Medicaid ban on transition-related surgeries remains.
Nationally, Medicare excluded these surgeries until May 2014, categorizing gender-affirming surgery as “experimental.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Departmental Appeals Board ruled in 2014 that transition-related care decisions should be made like other Medicare care decisions: on an individual basis. While Medicare insurers are not required to cover gender-affirming surgery, they are scrutinized if they refuse medically necessary services related to gender transition.
Unlike Medicare, Medicaid is largely implemented by individual states. Iowa Administrative Code classifies transition-related surgeries as “a cosmetic, reconstructive or plastic surgery”, and so bans Medicaid coverage for it. Tell that to a transgender person who has met all candidate criteria for surgery, including undergoing significant medical and psychological evaluations, medical therapies and behavioral trials. You can find the language excluding transition-related surgery from Medicaid coverage in IAC 441.78.1(4)(d).

North Dakota
The Fargo-Moorhead Gay Men’s Chorus is headed to New York:

The Fargo-Moorhead Gay Men’s Chorus (FMGMC), founded in 2013, will soon be bringing their musical talent to Lincoln Center in New York City. For the relatively new chorus, this is just as big a deal as it sounds.
The FMGMC’s next event is its annual Holiday Concert, “I Heard the Bells,” Sunday, December 11th at 2 pm at the Sanctuary Events Center. According to the FMGMC Steering Committee President, Adam Johnston, the annual holiday concert is “the highlight of each FMGMC season” and that this year the chorus is “shining the lights even brighter this year as we partner with HPR and Sanctuary Events Center.”
The FMGMC has a current roster of 18 men. They also have a primary piano accompanist, Jared Hoeft; a secondary piano accompanist and flautist, Amanda Hoeft; an Artistic Director, Angel Lira; an Event Manager, Iris Huss; and a Production Manager, Laurie Seifert.
Then, on June 4, 2017, the FMGMC will participate in a performance of “Tyler’s Suite” under the director of Tim Seelig, artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, at Lincoln Center, NYC.