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Anoka-Hennepin Teacher: It’s all lies!

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One of the Anoka-Hennepin teachers accused of harassing a student with anti-gay slurs has hit back against charges that she and her co-worker, Walter Filson, subjected him to co-ordinated harassment that, the students’ family claims, forced their son to switch schools. The Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune report that Dianne Cleveland accused Alex Merritt of making up the accusations in revenge for her telling administrators that Merritt had talked about bringing a gun to school.

The PiPress quotes the Anoka-Hennepin school district’s lawyer saying a “vague rumor” about students talking about a gun, but “could not substantiate it,” throwing doubt on Cleveland’s statement that she got Merritt in trouble.

For her part, Merritt’s mother categorically denied that her son would have thought about bringing a gun to school.

“That is totally a lie,” she said. “The whole idea of that is just crazy. If someone brought a gun to school, don’t you think that would be all over the paper?”

She said her son — who graduated high school in the spring and enlisted in the military — would have nothing to do with a gun. “Alex won’t even go hunting,” she said.

Both Filson and Cleveland – who are on unpaid leave, and facing calls for them to be fired – also accused the Minnesota Department of Human Rights of not interviewing them when preparing their definitive report on the incident. The PiPress reports that the Department relied on the school district’s own investigation, which concluded Filson and Cleveland had indeed harassed Merritt, but may not have known the two teachers disputed the allegations.

Marriage vs. Employment Discrimination

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This morning, US Reps. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Jared Polis (D-CO), and Jerry Nadler (D-NY) announced a new bill that would repeal the federal Defense Of Marriage Act, aka DOMA, and insert a “certainty provision” into federal law that would guarantee federal benefits for couples living in states that do not recognize same-sex marriage if they were married in another state that allowed it. However, Rep. Barny Frank, a titan of gay issues in the House of Representatives, refuses to support the bill, the Washington Blade reports.

According to the Blade, Frank believes Baldwin, Polis, and Nadler, along with the Human Rights Campaign, the main lobbying force behind a repeal of DOMA, are over-reaching.

“It’s not anything that’s achievable in the near term,” he said. “I think getting [the Employment Non-Discrimination Act], a repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and full domestic partner benefits for federal employees will take up all of what we can do and maybe more in this Congress.”

Frank also said that advocacy for the “certainty provision,” as described by Nadler, would create “political problems” in Congress.

“The provision that says you can take your benefits as you travel, I think, will stir up unnecessary opposition with regard to the question of are you trying to export it to other states,” he said. “If we had a chance to pass that, it would be a different story, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to rekindle that debate when there’s no chance of passage in the near term.”

This tension over priorities has been at the center of LGBTQ political advocacy for many years. Supporters of same-sex marriage say that theirs is the issue of the day, while critics say that same-sex marriage chiefly benefits middle- and upper-class gays and lesbians, and leaves out many trans and queer people, and many poorer members of the community. A bill expanding the federal government’s definition of a hate crime to include crimes motivated by disability, perceived sexual orientation or gender identity was passed earlier this year by the House.

Rivalry between activist groups endangers ant-Prop 8 fight

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It looks like 2008 all over again — internecine fighting in the pro-equality camp seems to be distracting California’s two biggest anti-Proposition 8 organizing groups from the main fight. Equality California and the Courage Campaign are locked in a spat over strategy — the former advocates postponing the main battle until 2012, when more voters can be educated on the issue (and when more older, conservative voters will be dead, and more younger, liberal-leaning voters will be on the rolls), while the latter is pushing for a campaign as soon as possible, in 2010. With two organizations competing for the same pool of dollars, but pulling in different directions, the war against California’s discriminatory constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage may lack the resources to go in any particular direction.

Feminsting has an impatient run-down of the two camps’ positions and jockeying.