A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, found that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to keep military recruiters off their campuses to protest the Defense Department policy of excluding gays from military service.

Colleges Can Bar Army Recruiters

The 2-to-1 decision relied in large part on a decision in 2000 by the United States Supreme Court to allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Just as the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays, the appeals court said, law schools may prohibit groups that they consider discriminatory.

the worm slipped through the Senate's firewall, ensuring that no staffer could access his or her computer without being confronted with images of gay sex

"We don't need a study, if I remember my biology correctly, to show us that those people who are sexually abstinent have a zero chance of becoming pregnant or getting someone pregnant or contracting a sexually transmitted disease," said Wade Horn, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services in charge of federal abstinence funding.

Facing a record budget shortfall of about $250 million and about 475 uncompleted sites, the nearly 25-year-old program aimed at protecting Americans from industrial contamination is in crisis. Program managers are scaling back their spending requests and slowing cleanups. Republicans and Democrats agree that the program needs more money, but its budget has been stagnant for a decade and its original industry-funded multibillion-dollar trust fund is broke.

The pattern is by no means uniform -- both the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia report steady numbers of African Americans enrolling -- but it is sufficiently widespread to cause concern among university presidents and students alike. State flagship institutions appear to be experiencing the biggest declines, while some private universities and many community colleges and second-tier state schools are reporting an increase in minority enrollment.

"parties to a civil union who use artificial insemination to conceive a child can be treated no differently than a husband and wife, who, unable to conceive a child biologically, choose to conceive a child by inseminating the wife with the sperm of an anonymous donor."

Court Says Both in Gay Union Are Parents

I realize that saying anything that doesn’t support the majority line on legalizing gay and lesbian marriage is tantamount to treason and punishable by an immediate shunning. But I simply don’t understand why we, as a people, want anything to do with an archaic institution, historically based on ensuring the legitimacy of heirs. Has anyone looked at the divorce statistics recently? Are we really so arrogant as to believe we’ll do a better job with it? Check your u-Haul™ receipts before you answer that one. The “legal protections” argument is horrifically naïve. Just talk to anyone who ended up on the wrong end of a pre-nup. And while the “rights” argument, human or civil, is hard to contest without looking like a real schmuck, all it suggests to me is that we should have the right to be miserable, greedy and conform to other people’s expectations just like straight people. And, as far as this issue being some form of resistance from growing conservative political trends, let’s be objective enough to realize that much of the anti-same-sex-marriage bullying from the current administration is a sneaky way of avoiding the issue of dead soldiers. We’re simply pawns and we’re playing the role as well as expected.

President Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act when he was in the White House, advised Kerry in a phone call early in the campaign to find a way to support the state bans. Kerry never considered abandoning his principles to that extent, but he also didn’t take seriously enough the threat. Expanding the definition of “values” beyond opposition to gay marriage and abortion is the challenge for Democrats. Nader points to the fact that initiatives calling for an increase in the minimum wage won in Florida and Nevada. What if the Democrats had gotten behind those initiatives with the same fervor Republicans backed same-sex marriage bans? Paying people a decent wage can be framed as a moral issue.

Nader Was Right