DENVER (AP) – Governor Bill Owens vetoed a bill May 27 that would have outlawed workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians. But he allowed a measure to take effect extending protection to gays and lesbians under Colorado’s hate crimes law.

The workplace discrimination bill would have prohibited an employer from firing, demoting or harassing an employee based on sexual orientation.

Owens, a Republican, said he considered the measure unnecessary and said it could force employers to spend a lot of money defending lawsuits.

Opponents of the bill had argued that an employer might not know the sexual orientation of a job applicant or employee but could be sued for alleged discrimination nonetheless.

House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, a Democrat, said he was disappointed by the veto.

“It’s a good thing Bill Owens wasn’t governor in the 1960s or we wouldn’t have civil rights laws on the books,” Romanoff said.

Gay rights groups said it did not make sense for Owens to let one bill become law and veto another.

“On the one hand, you have the governor saying it’s wrong to inflict violence on gay people, but it’s OK to fire a person because they are gay,” said David Smith, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign.

Owens said he let the hate crimes bill become law without his signature because it was part of an omnibus crime bill. The measure would increase penalties for attacking gays and lesbians because of their sexual orientation.

MIAMI (AP) – A Roman Catholic priest has accused the Miami Archdiocese of wrongly firing him for complaining about homosexual activity by a fellow priest and financial improprieties. But the archdiocese denied that he was fired and called the allegations “malicious.”

The Rev. Andrew Dowgiert sued in state court in Miami. His suit said the immediate cause of his firing from All Saints Catholic Church in Sunrise was that he resisted an archdiocese attempt to send him away for psychological and alcohol treatment. Dowgiert denied any problem with alcohol, the suit said.

Dowgiert said he was removed after refusing to sign checks for what the lawsuit calls “excessive” amounts while the pastor at All Saints was on vacation with a male companion. Two of Dowgiert’s lawyers said one check was for $5,000 for a bed.

His lawyers said he was also being punished for complaining about the pastor’s domestic partner, who was frequently at the parish.

Archbishop John Favalora “will defend the archdiocese and the priests named in this lawsuit very vigorously,” archdiocese spokesperson Mary Ross Agosta said. “For someone to malign reputations of priests who have been good and faithful servants is malicious.”

“Father Dowgiert has never belonged to the Archdiocese of Miami and served here temporarily with the permission of his Archbishop and [Favalora],” the archdiocese said in a statement. “When it became necessary to end Father Dowgiert’s service here, the norms of canon law were followed.”

Dowgiert was ordained in Poland in 1988 and served in South Florida between 1999 and 2004. He is suing on several counts, including breach of employment contract, slander and whistle-blower retaliation. He is seeking reinstatement.

NILES, Ill. (AP) – A former shoe department manager at a J.C. Penney Co. store in this Chicago suburb is seeking more than $7 million in damages in a suit alleging he was fired because he is HIV-positive.

In his lawsuit, Joseph Manasse alleges his bosses gave him a merit raise and an excellent performance review before falsely accusing him of stealing $66.20 from cash register receipts because they didn’t like his HIV status.

A spokesperson at Penney headquarters in Plano, Texas, declined to discuss specifics of the lawsuit.

“We always attempt to conduct our business in a proper and ethical manner and respect the rights of all our employees,” the Penney spokesperson said.

Manasse ran the shoe department for 15 months until May 20, 2003. Shoe sales increased by 11 percent during that time, according to the lawsuit.

The store managers reported the alleged theft to local police. Manasse was found not guilty of theft by a judge, his lawsuit states, but the theft report prevented him from getting another job, the suit alleges.

The lawsuit, filed under state law in Cook County Circuit Court, comes more than a decade after a wave of lawsuits from people with AIDS hit the federal courts.

Despite higher awareness among employers about patients’ legal rights and better drugs that keep patients healthier, activists say discrimination continues. Discrimination is more sophisticated than a decade ago and can be motivated by fear of increased health care and insurance costs, activists said.

“The stigma is certainly still out there, but we’ve also got a system where there are economic incentives against hiring or retaining somebody with HIV,” said Ann Fisher, executive director of the AIDS Legal Council of Chicago.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) – Monroe County school administrators called off plans to survey students about their sexual behavior after parents raised concerns that the questions were too explicit.

Jennifer Staab, the 10,700-student district’s health programs coordinator, said officials would revise the survey over the summer based on feedback from parents and community groups.

“Parents should know what we’re doing and feel comfortable,” she told the Indiana Daily Student.

The voluntary, confidential survey included 51 questions for students in grades 6-12 on topics such as intercourse, oral sex, abstinence, sex education and AIDS. Parents could have opted their children out of the survey.

Officials said they planned the survey last year after parents expressed concern over reports that some middle school students were sexually active.

Some officials and parents were concerned with reports that young teens were using oral sex as a substitute for intercourse to avoid becoming pregnant and mistakenly believed such activity could not spread sexually transmitted diseases.

“We feel like we have to a better job with our health curriculum – the misperception oral sex is not sex,” Staab said.

A study by the University of California-San Francisco found that one out of every five ninth graders from two Northern California high schools said they had engaged in oral sex, compared with about 13 out of every 100 who said they had had intercourse, the Indiana University student newspaper reported.

Staab said parents and schools were seeking “real data” about the prevalence of misinformed sex attitudes and behavior among teens to begin a community effort to “redefine” the schools’ health curriculum.

ASHLAND, Ore. (AP) – Fliers urging the killing of gays and lesbians at Southern Oregon University have been littering the campus over the past two weeks, triggering anger and shock from administrators, students and politicians.

“I am not shocked by this, and neither are my brothers and sisters,” Deltra Ferguson, coordinator of the university’s Women’s Resource Center, told The Mail-Tribune of Medford. “We are under assault daily.”

One flier bore the message: “And the Bible says that homosexual offenders should be put to death. … So help eradicate homophobia now. Kill the Queer.”

“This is happening to friends and student leaders,” said Roger Wert, president of the student Senate, in a story posted on the Medford newspaper’s Web site. “It’s happening to me.”

Wert, who is gay, said he recently was the victim of a hate crime when some young men accosted him and two girlfriends at a convenience store in Ashland, making lewd sexual advances.

Wert said the men spat at him, threw rocks and hurled expletives.

Southern Oregon University president Elizabeth Zinser proposed a 10-point plan to combat hate crimes, including more investigation, more training and more education on the issues.

SEATTLE (AP) – Microsoft Corp. says it has severed ties with Ralph Reed, a Republican lobbyist who once headed the Christian Coalition and is now running for lieutenant governor in Georgia.

“Ralph Reed is no longer on retainer with Microsoft,” company spokesperson Ginny Terzano told The Associated Press.

The move came a month after liberal activists urged Microsoft to quit using Reed as a political consultant, upset that the software company had pulled its support for a Washington state gay rights bill it had backed in the past. The company has since said it will support such legislation in the future.

“Microsoft has a wide range of consultants on retainer, both Democrats and Republicans, and they are brought on based on need and for various reasons, but it’s not our policy to discuss specifics about their retainers,” Terzano said.

She noted that Century Strategies, a public relations and lobbying firm Reed founded in 1997, lobbied for Microsoft on international trade and competition, not social issues.

While she wouldn’t comment on Reed’s candidacy for lieutenant governor, Terzano said: “It would not be appropriate to have a consultant on retainer that is seeking elective office at the same time.”

Century Strategies did not immediately return calls for comment.