LOS ANGELES (AP) – The city’s school district and the American Civil Liberties Union announced the settlement last week of a federal lawsuit that accused employees at a high school of harassing gay and lesbian students and staff members.

The settlement will require anti-discrimination training for students and staff at Washington Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles as well as for middle school students who will attend the campus. Additional details about the settlement were not released.

Filed in October, the suit accused administrators and teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District campus of creating “a climate rife with hostility toward and discrimination against students and staff based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation.”

ACLU of Southern California attorney Christine Sun said she was pleased with the settlement, calling the mandatory training “a model for the rest of the state.”

Deanne Neiman of LAUSD noted that the district has already had anti-discrimination training programs in place.

“At Washington Prep, this settlement agreement augments the comprehensive training and activities already underway at the school,” she said.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” an ABC television reality series that pushes hot buttons of racism and anti-homosexuality, was pulled by the network before its debut.

The program had drawn criticism from groups claiming it risked fostering prejudice.

In a statement last week, ABC acknowledged the delicate nature of the series in which families asked to pick a new neighbor are made to expose and overcome their biases.

“Welcome to the Neighborhood” demonstrates what happens when people are forced to “confront preconceived notions of what makes a good neighbor,” the network said. “However, the fact that true change only happens over time made the episodic nature of this series challenging, and given the sensitivity of the subject matter in early episodes we have decided not to air the series at this time.”

The six-episode show, which was to debut July 10, follows three families in Austin, Texas, who are given the chance to choose a new neighbor for a house on their street.

Each family initially wants someone similar to them – white and conservative.

Instead, they must choose from families that are black, Hispanic and Asian; two gay white men who’ve adopted a black child; a couple covered in tattoos and piercings; a couple who met at the woman’s initiation as a witch; and a poor white family.

In the early episodes, one man makes a crack about the number of children piling out of the Hispanic family’s car and displays of affection between the gay men provoke disgust.

The series’ producers had said it was intended to promote a healthy and open debate about prejudice and people’s fear of differences.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, after viewing the series, expressed strong concerns.

While it ultimately carries a valuable message about diversity and acceptance, those watching the first episodes could be left thinking discrimination is “not that big a deal,” said GLAAD spokesperson Damon Romine.

“Regardless of how things turn out at the end of the last show, it’s dangerous to let intolerance and bigotry go unchallenged for weeks at a time,” he said, adding that GLAAD hopes a revised version might air.

Before ABC announced its decision, the Family Research Council said it was worried evangelicals would be made to appear judgmental and foolish.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Gays and lesbians won a major legal victory on June 29 when the California Supreme Court let stand a new law granting registered domestic partners many of the same rights and protections legally married couples receive.

Without comment, the unanimous justices upheld appellate and trial court rulings that the sweeping measure does not conflict with a voter-approved initiative defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Justice Janice Rogers Brown, who left the California Supreme Court on June 30 to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, did not vote.

The domestic partner law, which was signed in 2003 by former Gov. Gray Davis and took effect Jan. 1, represents the nation’s most comprehensive recognition of gay and lesbian domestic rights after recognition of civil unions in Vermont and Connecticut. California’s law grants registered couples virtually every spousal right available under state law except the ability to file joint income taxes.

The Campaign for California Families, along with the late Sen. Pete Knight, challenged the domestic partnership law, saying it undermines Proposition 22 – the 2000 initiative that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Knight, a Republican from Palmdale who died after the suit was filed, was the author of that measure, which passed with 61 percent of the vote.

But the June 29 ruling by California’s justices, the final arbitrators of state law, upheld an April decision by the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento, which had ruled Proposition 22’s language is clearly limited to “marriage.”

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Author Terry McMillan has filed for divorce from the man who inspired the 1996 novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which chronicled the romantic adventures of a 40-something woman who falls for a guy half her age.

In papers filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, McMillan, 53, says she decided to end her six-and-a-half-year marriage to Jonathan Plummer, 30, after learning he is gay.

The revelation led her to conclude Plummer married only to get his U.S. citizenship, she said. McMillan met Plummer at a Jamaican resort a decade ago.

“It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicized to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit,” she said in court papers. “I was humiliated.”

In response, Plummer maintained McMillan treated him with “homophobic” scorn bordering on harassment since he came out to her as gay just before Christmas.

McMillan is seeking to have the marriage annulled; Plummer has asked the court to set aside a prenuptial agreement that would prevent him from getting spousal support.

McMillan filed for divorce in January, but news of the split didn’t surface until last week, when it was first reported in a San Francisco Chronicle gossip column. Earlier this month, a judge ordered McMillan to pay Plummer $2,000 a month in spousal support and $25,000 in attorney’s fees until the case comes back to court in October.

McMillan’s latest novel, The Interruption of Everything, is scheduled to hit store shelves next month. It plots the mid-life adventures of a married mother of three who is questioning her comfortable suburban life.

McMillan said she did not plan to let a divorce “detract from the many blessings in her life,” according to a statement released through her publicist.

Plummer’s attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.

TORRINGTON, Conn. (AP) – Members of the First Congregational Church have voted to leave the United Church of Christ, citing disagreements with the denomination’s stance on human sexuality and other issues.

Church members voted 31 to 4 to leave the denomination as of Oct. 1.

Pastor Steven Darr said representatives of other churches within the denomination were at the meeting as observers and those churches are weighing a similar decision.

“For years the church has been batting this around,” Darr said. “They’ve really done their work on this. It wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to any one issue.”

Torrington’s Center Congregational and United Congregational churches remain members of the United Church of Christ.

First Congregational becomes the fourth parish in the state church’s Northwest District to leave in recent months. The others include Winsted Church of Christ, Northfield Congregational Church in Litchfield and Beacon Falls Congregational Church.

All the churches have left because of state and national convention votes that endorse same-sex marriage and ordination of gays.

First Congregational, founded in 1741, owns its church building and won’t have to vacate it as a result of the vote.

MUNCIE, Ind. (AP) – The first Muncie Pride festival drew hundreds of gays, lesbians and their families to a laid-back gathering featuring food, music and information.

“If you had told me 20 years ago that we would have a local Pride event, I would have never believed it,” said speaker Mike Sullivan, a retired Ball State University professor and a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation that joined other local, state and national groups in supporting the event.

Heather Pier, a lesbian, organized the festival as a low-key event but said same-sex couples should have a larger voice in the communities. Pier, who attended the event with her 7-year-old son, said same-sex couples share the same family values as opposite-sex couples.

Some sponsors had feared an organized anti-gay protest might occur, but none materialized and opposition was spotty.

Nevertheless, some people attending Muncie Pride said gays and lesbians still face discrimination.

“You don’t know how hard it is … in a small town if your child is gay,” said Phil Davis, a Ball State student. “It’s all over.”

An amendment to the Indiana Constitution that would ban same-sex marriages passed the Indiana General Assembly last spring. If it passes again in two years, the amendment will go before voters in a statewide referendum.

An Indianapolis Pride celebration, IN Pride, drew thousands of gays and lesbians June 10-12.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) – Among the changes made to the benefits package for Rockwell Collins employees is the addition of medical benefits for same-sex domestic partners, company officials said.

Collins also plans to offer optional health insurance to part-time employees, additional long-term care insurance and optional pet insurance.

The Cedar Rapids-based maker of avionics and sophisticated cockpit radios and navigation systems, is the region’s largest private employer. The company hopes to use the benefits to attract more qualified employees it could soon find in short supply.

Collins leaders recently told a local diversity conference that Collins expects to hire 7,000 people worldwide over the next five years.

Only about 11 percent of companies in the United States offered health benefits to same-sex domestic partners in a 2002 survey by Hewitt Associates, an Illinois-based business consultant.

More large employers are adding the benefit, however. Forty-two percent of Fortune 500 companies offered health benefits for same-sex partners, according to a February 2004 study by a gay and lesbian political organization, the Human Rights Campaign Fund.

Collins spokesperson Nancy Welsh said the company expanded employee benefits because research indicated a more competitive benefits package is needed to attract a qualified work force. Same-sex partner health benefits was among the areas identified as needed.

Collins does not offer health benefits to employees’ unmarried domestic partners of the opposite sex, Welsh said. Its research indicated the lack of a marriage option for most same-sex couples is behind the decision by more employers to add the benefit.

Same-sex partners will be required to meet age, residency and other requirements, Welch said, and health benefits for part-time employees will not be subsidized by Collins at the same level as full-time employees. The main benefit to part-time employees of using Collins health insurance will be the savings derived from being part of a large group plan.

ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) – Montgomery County’s board of education has approved a plan that will remove references to specific religious beliefs from its health education curriculum but will allow for the discussion of sexual orientation.

The deal, which was approved by a 7-to-0 vote, is the result of negotiations between the board and two parent groups who sued the school system over a revised health education curriculum that was to begin this spring. A federal judge blocked the system from implementing the new program in May, prompting the schools to put it on hold.

The settlement also requires the school system to pay the $36,000 legal fees incurred by the groups that filed the lawsuit, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and the Virginia-based Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays.

The curriculum, adopted in November, included a videotaped demonstration on how to use a condom for 10th-graders and allowed teachers to discuss homosexuality with eighth-graders. The settlement calls for the drafting of a new curriculum next year that does not bar the system from again including discussions of homosexuality.

It also addresses objections over teacher training material that referred to the varying beliefs of certain religious denominations about homosexuality. The two groups that filed suit objected to that language, as did the judge who issued a restraining order through the end of the year so that a settlement could be reached.

School Superintendent Jerry Weast said the system was prepared to fight the case in court but that it could have become too costly.

“Reasonable leadership of this school system requires that we find a way of settling this dispute without compromising the Board of Education’s sole authority over the curriculum of our school system,” he said.

The board also agreed to allow two members of the groups to serve on a citizens advisory panel that will offer guidance on the new curriculum. Public meetings for parents will be held and parents will be able to review the materials before the program is implemented.

Plaintiffs said the settlement was a mixed victory. Some had hoped to include the perspective of ex-gays, but the system would not agree, according to Rena Lindevaldsen, senior litigator with the Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based group that argued the case for the two groups.

“We’re very happy that the board pulled the other curriculum that we challenged, but we wished we could have gotten more,” she said.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) – Publicity over HIV testing got a shot in the arm from one of Nebraska’s most well-known political figures.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha invited reporters into a health clinic on June 28 to watch him be tested for the virus that causes AIDS, with the hopes it will encourage others to undergo the procedure.

“It’s very quick. It’s painless. It’s confidential,” Chambers said after getting the test.

The normally private Chambers said he wanted to spread the message that HIV is treatable, testing is easy and anyone in a public position should be adamant about addressing this “health issue of such profound gravity.”

HIV can be transmitted sexually or through contact with infected blood. Babies born to HIV-infected women also are at risk either before or during birth, and through breast-feeding.

After asking Chambers some personal questions, a nurse tied an elastic band around the senator’s bulging right biceps, told him he would count to three and then pricked his arm.

In seconds, Chambers was holding a cotton ball on the puncture site and laughing.

“I’m hoping everybody of whatever race, religion, whatever is going to take this test,” Chambers said.

The veteran lawmaker, who joined the Legislature in 1971, said he felt compelled by the spike in HIV infection rates among African-Americans to show how important and easy getting tested is.

Health advocates urge anyone who is sexually active or otherwise at risk to get tested.

“It’s as easy as coming in and spending a few minutes,” said Richard Brown, CEO of the Charles Drew Health Center where Chambers scheduled his test. “It’s important for people to be responsible and protect themselves and their loved ones.”

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – In the last six months of 2000, when Vermont was the only state in the nation recognizing anything resembling marriage for same-sex couples, 1,709 couples were joined in civil unions.

The popularity has waned every year since and has plummeted since Massachusetts began permitting same-sex marriages a year ago and several Canadian provinces did the same.

For all 12 months of 2004, 711 couples obtained civil unions “and we won’t even come close to that this year,” said Rich McCoy, chief of public health statistics at the state Health Department.

“I would say the primary reason is same-sex marriage in Massachusetts,” McCoy said. “Many, many of our civil unions in the first couple of years were to couples in Massachusetts. Also … the numbers we had coming from Canada dropped off. Now Connecticut has its own civil union law. We did get couples from Connecticut.”

“There’s more and more options for these couples back in their home states or countries,” McCoy said.

Besides the states he mentioned, California couples can register with the state and qualify for all the benefits of marriage except for the right to file taxes jointly. Oregon is close to becoming the third state to offer civil unions.

Civil unions have been most popular with out-of-state couples. Of the 7,549 couples that have had civil union ceremonies since July 1, 2000, only 1,137 have been between Vermonters. Of the total, there have been 78 dissolutions, or divorces.

Slightly more than two-thirds of the couples have been women, McCoy said.