LITTLE ROCK (AP) – A measure banning gays from adopting or fostering children will be on the Arkansas general election ballot next year if the Arkansas Family Council succeeds in gathering enough signatures, the group’s leader said Tuesday.

Jerry Cox, executive director of the council, said the council will soon submit a proposed ballot title to the attorney general’s office. Cox said a draft of the ban has not been completed, but it would be similar to a ban that was defeated in the Legislature earlier this year.

Legislation barring gays and unmarried couples from fostering or adopting children passed the state Senate, but failed before the House Judiciary Committee during this year’s session. The measure would have reinstated a ban on gay foster parents struck down by the Arkansas Supreme Court last year.

Cox said the organization has drafted several versions of the measure and said he hoped it would be completed within the next couple of weeks. He said a decision has not yet been made on whether to promote the ban as an initiated act or a constitutional amendment.

To place a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot, supporters would have to gather the signatures of registered voters equal to 10 percent of the ballots cast in last year’s governor’s election, about 78,000 signatures. An initiated act would require 8 percent of the votes cast, or around 62,000 signatures. First, though, the measure’s language must be approved by Attorney General Dustin McDaniel’s office.

Gov. Mike Beebe has said the ban proposed during the session faced constitutional problems because it did not offer equal protection to all people. Beebe spokesperson Matt DeCample said the governor could not comment on the ballot issue because he had not seen the specific proposal, but said the measure could face the same hurdles.

“Even if you’re going to a different forum than the Legislature, you still have the same potential constitutional concerns to address, depending on how it’s written,” DeCample said.

Cox said he believed the proposal would find more support among voters and cited the overwhelming victory in 2004 of a constitutional amendment declaring marriage as between a man and a woman.

“On this particular issue, I believe the opinion of the Legislature and the opinion of the public as a whole is pretty far apart,” Cox said. “I believe many of the same people who voted for the marriage amendment in 2004 would support this.”

Cox said the measure would be considerably shorter than the four-page legislation that was defeated earlier this year.

“Right now, we’re working on a measure that’s less than one page,” Cox said.

The ban struck down last year by the state’s high court was a regulation adopted by the state Child Welfare Board in March 1999. The board said children were more likely to thrive in a traditional two-parent home and should be placed in such homes.

In a unanimous ruling, justices last year said testimony in the state’s appeal demonstrated that “the driving force behind adoption of the regulations was not to promote the health, safety and welfare of foster children but rather based upon the board’s views of morality and its bias against homosexuals.”

Rita Sklar, executive director of the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said her organization would work with other groups to oppose any attempt to put the ban on the 2008 ballot. The ACLU represented the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the ban’s repeal.

ST. JOSEPH (AP) – A man who spent five years in jail for exposing sexual partners to HIV was sentenced to life in prison for knowingly exposing another woman to the virus.

Sean L. Sykes, 33, was sentenced Tuesday in Missouri. He was found guilty in May of having unprotected sex with a St. Joseph woman without telling her he was HIV positive. Testimony at his trial – which was closed to the public to protect witnesses – indicated that he had exposed at least eight women to HIV. At least three have tested positive.

Sykes was convicted in 1997 of knowingly exposing someone to HIV. He was given the maximum sentence of 10 years, but was paroled in 2003.

Buchanan County Prosecutor Dwight Scroggins said Sykes has had “numerous” other unknown sexual contacts since he first tested positive 16 years ago.

Prosecutors said Sykes began having a sexual relationship with a St. Joseph woman in 2004, never telling her that he had HIV.

Sykes contended at his trial that the woman knew he was HIV positive. He apologized Tuesday for his behavior.

MISSOULA (AP) – Two 20-year-old men accused of uttering anti-gay epithets while severely beating a man, then leaving him tied up in his downtown apartment, pleaded not guilty Tuesday in District Court.

Michael D. Lemay and Christopher L. Newrider appeared for their arraignment hearings via video from the Missoula County jail, where each remained jailed on $100,000 bail.

Both men face felony charges of aggravated assault and aggravated kidnapping in the May 8 beating of Stevenpaul Richey, 51.

Court records say Richey met Lemay and Newrider on the night of May 7 at a downtown Missoula bar and invited them back to his apartment.

Once there, Lemay and Newrider allegedly bound Richey’s hands and ankles before beating him, uttering anti-gay epithets and leaving him tied up in the apartment, court documents said.

Richey was found hours later by a friend and was hospitalized with facial fractures, broken ribs and a collapsed lung.

Staff at St. Patrick Hospital told police that Richey could have died if he hadn’t been found so quickly, court records said.

Missoula Police Detective Dean Chrestenson has said he is investigating the possibility of a bias-based crime.

Montana’s hate crime law doesn’t include enhanced sentences for attacks based on a person’s sexual orientation.

Judge Robert L. Deschamps III scheduled a June 26 bond hearing for Lemay.

NEWARK (AP) – The accusations continue to fly in the messy divorce of former governor James E. McGreevey and wife Dina Matos McGreevey.

A little over a month after filing libel and defamation claims against her estranged husband for calling her homophobic and saying she made anti-gay statements, Matos McGreevey has charged in court papers that his claims have negatively affected the sales of her recently released memoir.

Matos McGreevey said the former governor “used his experience in manipulating the media” by making his claims “shortly before the publication of [her] much anticipated memoir.”

The claims were reported in Tuesday’s editions of the New York Post.

The book, Silent Partner, was released on May 1 and was ranked No. 4,044 on Amazon.com Tuesday morning. Her husband’s book, titled The Confession, was ranked 14,111. It was released last September.

Matos McGreevey alleges that the claims that she was homophobic and knew about her estranged husband’s sexual orientation before they were married have kept book sales down “by deterring purchases by members of the gay community [and to] members of the general public who were interested in whether she knew of his sexual orientation when the parties married.”

She also claims in court papers that because of her estranged husband’s comments, “persons were deterred from associating with her” in her capacity as head of a non-profit foundation that raises money for Newark’s Columbus Hospital.

The former governor moved last month to have the libel and defamation charges dismissed.

McGreevey, 49, shocked the nation in August 2004 by proclaiming himself “a gay American” who had an extramarital affair with a male aide, and that he would resign that November. The aide denies having an affair and claims he was sexually harassed by the former governor.

WASHINGTON (AP) – California Rep. Ellen Tauscher said Wednesday that she’ll be leading a new congressional push to overturn the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law governing gays in the military – but she acknowledged it’s an uphill battle.

“The key is to keep building momentum, to keep building the case, and to give people the sense that it is a significant priority,” Tauscher, D-Alamo, told reporters on a conference call with officials from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and the Human Rights Campaign.

Legislation to overturn the 1994 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law has been championed in the House by Rep. Marty Meehan of Massachusetts, but he’s resigning effective July 1 to become a university chancellor.

Tauscher, a six-term incumbent and centrist member of the House Armed Services Committee, said she’ll take up the mantle and push for hearings on the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2007 that would undo “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”