It's been a while since we checked in with David Davis, the Floridian principal who last year told a lesbian student that homosexuality's morally wrong, prohibited her from wearing gay pride garb and then went on a "witch hunt" for gay students.

The ACLU and the student, Heather Gillman, have since successfully sued Davis. The educator found himself demoted, Ponce de Leon High School faculty must now take sensitivity training and the school must pay Gillman's $325,000 legal bills.

While one would think all this would teach the town a lesson, it has not…

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The Peace Corp tries to keep thing copacetic, but some queer policies spurred the ACLU into full-on war mode.

Former volunteer Jeremiah Johnson contacted the group after being booted from the Corp for contracting HIV. Obviously the experience was not positive:

I joined the Peace Corps because I wanted to learn more about the world and help people. It was hard enough to learn that I had contracted HIV, but to then be shipped home and told I was unworthy of finishing my service was incredibly humiliating.”

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America's contrived civil unions can be so taxing!

Just ask Jason Smith and Settimo Pisu, a civil unionized couple from Hartford, Connecticut.

The boys tried to file their taxes on H&R Block's TaxCut Online website, but received quite a rude message: "We don't support Connecticut civil union returns." When will the internet learn manners?

Connecticut passed civil union laws over three years ago, but the national tax company has yet to update their online system. Instead, it directed them to a local H&R Block office or an "online professional," which apparently costs a pretty pink penny.

The perfectly suburban Smith and Pisu are incensed. As they should be…

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The American Civil Liberties Union came out publicly to explain their Larry Craig support:

The [ACLU] supports Senator Larry Craig’s attempt to have his guilty plea withdrawn because the Minnesota law under which he was arrested is unconstitutionally broad. The statute punishes “offensive, obscene or abusive language” which tends to arouse “alarm, anger or resentment” in others. Clearly, this law has the potential to ensnare and criminalize legal, constitutionally protected free speech, including solicitation for private sex.

The Minnesota Supreme Court and other courts have found that a closed bathroom stall is a private location. The police have no business spying on people in places where there is an expectation of privacy. The ACLU is in no way advocating sex in public bathrooms. If law enforcement is genuinely interested in stopping sex in public bathrooms rather than ensnaring people in sting operations, posting a sign prohibiting it and announcing police patrols would be much more effective and would meet constitutional requirements.

Also, Craig's political action committee, Alliance for the West, has closed up shop.

Toilet trolling Senator Larry Craig has a friend in the ACLU:

In an effort to help Sen. Larry Craig, the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy.
…
The ACLU filed a brief Tuesday supporting Craig. It cited a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms "have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

That means the state cannot prove Craig was inviting an undercover officer to have sex in public, the ACLU wrote.
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The ACLU argued that even if Craig was inviting the officer to have sex, his actions wouldn't be illegal.

"The government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator Craig was inviting the undercover officer to engage in anything other than sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom," the ACLU wrote in its brief.

The ACLU also noted that Craig was originally charged with interference with privacy, which it said was an admission by the state that people in the bathroom stall expect privacy.

Craig resurrected his case earlier this month. Apparently he's a masochist, which makes sense.

It's never too early to get excited about the Out 100, gay glossy Out's annual celebration of the year's great, gay people, places and things. Well, actually just people.

The mag's tight-lipped about the honorees, but their celebratory blog posted this picture of 2007's "Rabble-rousers". We don't know how they did it, but the Out staffers and photographer François Rousseau managed to get Joe Solmonese and Lane Hudson in the same frame. The men, of course, worked together at Human Rights Campaign until Hudson outed Mark Foley and subsequently left the powerful non-profit. Also pictured: gay soldier Jason Knight and ACLU's leader Anthony Romero.

In other Out 100 news, we hear that honoree Darryl Stephens will finally acknowledged his homo inclinations. This will be the first time the Noah's Arc actor publicly "comes out".

As if we didn't know…

The Okeechobee County School Board got creative when it banned a gay straight alliance:

The Okeechobee County School Board has banned so-called "sex-based" clubs, a move the ACLU has called another attack on members of the Gay-Straight Alliance of Okeechobee High School.

In a unanimous vote Tuesday, school board members adopted the policy that bans any club that is "sex-based or based upon any sexual grouping, orientation or activity of any kind."

District officials have said the new policy, which takes effect immediately, aims to ban clubs that challenge the district's abstinence-only education.

So, the school not only gets to ban the group, but successfully boiled sexual identity down to sex acts. A for effort, F for equality.

Another day, another bathroom sex sting! North Carolina Coppers nabbed Boca Raton based Episcopal priest Michael Penland for soliciting an undercover officer at a rest stop and then following him in his car. Another cop pulled Penland over, issued a citation for "soliciting for a crime against nature” and sent on his way. Penland is but one of eight men arrested in a three-month sting police cleverly called "Operation Summer Heat".

As in the Larry Craig cruising case, the ACLU says the police overstepped their bounds and violated Penland's constitutional rights. Floridian ACLU lawyer Robert Rosenwald tells Express Gay News:

The charge is brazenly unconstitutional.
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What [Penland] did was not a crime. It’s not wrong to proposition someone and then go home. In a case like this, what is unconstitutional is the investigation targeting gay people and arresting [them] for conduct that is lawful.

ACLU officials say Penland, who has been married for 17-years, could sue the police department, but most probably won't come out to do it.

When news of the arrest broke earlier this month, Penland has stepped down as a youth counselor at St. Gregory's in Boca Raton and later resigned from the church entirely. He'll appear in court for a hearing on November 7th.

Larry Craig better send openly gay activist Anthony Romero a "thank you" card.

Romero and his constitution loving friends at the American Civil Liberties Union issued a "friend of the court" brief in disgraced Idaho Senator Larry Craig's defense. In a related-statement, ACLU executive director Romero said,

The real motive behind secret sting operations like the one that resulted in Senator Craig’s arrest is not to stop people from inappropriate activity. It is to make as many arrests as possible – arrests that sometimes unconstitutionally trap innocent people. If the police really want to stop people from having sex in public bathrooms, they should put up a sign banning sex in the restroom and send in a uniformed officer to patrol periodically. That works.

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Ex-convicts Daniel Mangini and Steven Roberts are free to love again. The recently released jailbirds have been together for more than twenty happy years, but things took an ugly turn when they started doing meth.

Desperate to feed their collective habit, Mangini and Roberts started selling the illegal drug. And, as happens, landed in jail.

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• A reader suggested we post Dead Disco's "You're Out". We think it's fairly appropriate.

• Perez Hilton to be televised. Preemptive barf.

• Gay Australian judge Michael Kirby asked PM John Howard to change his backward stance on gay benefits: "Johan has put up with me for 38 years, and if I died he’d get nothing."

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