Marc Felion of FeastForFun.com catches Wisconsin’s Lt. Governor candidate Rebecca Kleefisch in an unusual explanation for why gays and lesbians should be denied the right to marry. “We just don’t have the money to be giving out for extra benefits right now,” Kleefisch told WITI-TV’s ‘Real Milwaukee’ program, “It’s a fiscal back breaker”:

KLEEFISCH: I voted that way, I’m against gay marriage as well. I think that especially when it comes to $3 billion budget and it’s climbing. The legislative fiscal bureau announced about five days ago that we are actually $265 million dollars further in the hole than we expected to be this year. We just don’t have the money to be giving out for extra benefits right now. It’s a fiscal back breaker.

Watch it:

Kleefisch has made this argument before. “This doesn’t just have roots in the Bible, this has roots and fiscal common sense. We can’t at this point, afford to just be handing out money to anyone,” she said during an interview with WVCY radio. “This is a slippery slope in addition to that at what point are we going to okay marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table, or this clock, can we marry dogs?”

Of course Kleefisch is wrong in her budgetary projections. As the Williams Institute has argued, allowing gay people to marry would actually boost state economies.

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White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs refused to say whether President Obama would be willing to use his stop-loss authority to end discharges under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should Congress fail to repeal the policy, telling the Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld “our efforts in the short term will be focused on the durable repeal of a law that the President thinks is unjust. And that’s where our focus will be.” Watch it:

Gibbs also addressed this afternoon’s meeting between LGBT advocates and the White House, telling the Washington Blade’s Chris Johnson that administration officials will express their “desire to see the defense authorization bill pending before the Senate taken up.” “That includes a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, as the House has already voted on. The president wants the defense authorization act and that repeal passed,” Gibbs said. But when asked if the administration had pressured senators who voted against repeal last month to switch their votes, Gibbs admitted that it had not. “To my knowledge it has not taken place yet,” he said. “But the only way we’ll get something through the senate is to change the vote count and to move past — look, you’re going to have to get passed a promised filibuster and moving to the bill and certainly the only way we can move to the bill is to change some of those votes.”

Gibbs explained that advocates attending the meeting were told that they could not address the Justice Department’s ongoing defense of the policy before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because “some of the participants in the meeting are with groups that are in litigation at the plaintiff where the United States government is the defendant.” “I don’t think either side believes that those type of conversations about the litigation between two parties represented in a lawsuit is appropriate in the meeting,” he said.

“The president continues to believe that this is a law — that the time for the ending of this law has come. The courts are signaling that. And certainly it has been his political belief going back to when I first met him in 2004,” Gibbs added.

Responding to the growing number of LGBT teen suicides in recent weeks, the Obama administration announced today that “schools that don’t address the bullying of gay students may lose U.S. funds for not enforcing gender-discrimination laws.” In a first of its kind anti-bullying guidance distributed to some 15,000 school districts and colleges that receive federal funds, the Department of Education clarifies that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 “requires schools to take action against bullying—including gender-based and sexual harassment of LGBT students.”

“A school is responsible for addressing harassment incidents about which it knows or reasonably should have known,” the memo instructs. “In all cases, schools should have well-publicized policies prohibiting harassment and procedures for reporting and resolving complaints that will alert the school to incidents of harassment.” The memo provides “hypothetical examples of how a school’s failure to recognize student misconduct as discriminatory harassment violates students’ civil rights” and describes “how the school should have responded in each circumstance.” Here is the example of LGBT bullying:

Although Title IX does not prohibit discrimination based solely on sexual orientation, Title IX does protect all students, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, from sex discrimination. When students are subjected to harassment on the basis of their LGBT status, they may also, as this example illustrates, be subjected to forms of sex discrimination prohibited under Title IX. The fact that the harassment includes anti-LGBT comments or is partly based on the target’s actual or perceived sexual orientation does not relieve a school of its obligation under Title IX to investigate and remedy overlapping sexual harassment or gender-based harassment. In this example, the harassing conduct was based in part on the student’s failure to act as some of his peers believed a boy should act. The harassment created a hostile environment that limited the student’s ability to participate in the school’s education program (e.g., access to the drama club). Finally, even though the student did not identify the harassment as sex discrimination, the school should have recognized that the student had been subjected to gender-based harassment covered by Title IX.
In this example, the school had an obligation to take immediate and effective action to eliminate the hostile environment.

“This is a wonderful first step as far as what the Department of Education is capable of doing with the existing laws, now we need that comprehensive law like the Safe Schools Improvement Act that gives more clarity to the states and the school district as to how they can address this problem,” Daryl Presgraves, Media Relations Manager of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) told me during a phone interview.

“The practice right now falls to the states to enact enact anti-bullying laws absent any sort of federal action which we are hopeful will happen in the future.” Currently, 45 states that have enacted anti-bullying legislation but only 10 have a law that protects students from bullying based on sexual orientation and gender identity. A 2005 survey conducted by GLSEN found that these general laws do very little to prevent LGBT bullying, while “LGBT students who were covered by a comprehensive safe school policy that specifically protects sexual orientation were less likely to report being harassed at school, more likely to tell school officials when incidents of harassment occurred..and more than twice as likely to have a teacher intervene when harassment occurred versus students covered by a non-enumerated, or ‘generic,’ policy.” “Having a law that says don’t bully is great and feels good, but in practice, doesn’t necessary do a whole lot to address bullying in schools,” Presgraves added.

There are two pending pieces of federal legislation that would help enhance lax standards.. The Safe Schools Improvement Bill — sponsored by Representative Linda Sánchez (D-CA) in the House — would require schools and districts receiving federal funds “to adopt codes of conduct specifically prohibiting bullying and harassment, including on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.” Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) Student Non-Discrimination Act would prohibit discrimination in schools on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.

Presgraves said that the Obama administration is expanding on President Clinton’s interpretation of Title IX. “The Department of Justice under the Clinton administration, their interpretation of Title IX related to in some ways protections of bullying based off of sexual orientation and gender expression. The Bush administration did not intervene in cases or show their support in cases of students protected by Title IX based on sexual orientation and gender identity expression,” he said. “So what this essentially does is it goes back to the Clinton-era interpretation of the law and adds to it by putting out this clear message to schools.”

Yesterday, the Log Cabin Republicans, the group which won an injunction against enforcing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell earlier this month from a federal judge in California, filed a response to the government’s emergency motion for a stay in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the Department of Justice has not shown that “it is likely to succeed on the merits on appeal, or that it would sustain irreparable injury if the district court’s judgment remains in place pending determination of this appeal.” The court of appeals can decide whether to lift its temporary stay of an injunction barring enforcement of DADT at any time.

“The emergency stay of injunction that the government requests would perpetuate this unconstitutional state of affairs with no countervailing benefit to the government that outweighs the deprivation of rights such a stay would entail,” the group argues, pointing out that the government has “not shown irreparable injury if a stay is denied”:

Much of the appellants’ motion is devoted to their claim that the military will be harmed if the district court’s injunction remains in place while the government appeals. The supposed harms identified in the motion, and enumerated in the Stanley Declaration, are all to the military’s institutional interests and its bureaucratic needs. But the injunction does not require the military to take any affirmative measures: it does not order the military to redesign its barracks, to retool its pay scales or benefits, to re-ordain its chaplains, to rewrite its already extensive anti-harassment or “dignity and respect” rules, or anything else. Nor does it prevent the military from undertaking the acts appellants now claim it must do if DADT is enjoined – revising policies, preparing educational and training materials, and the lie. The district court’s injunction requires only one thing: to cease investigating and discharging honorable, patriotic, brave fighting men and women for reasons unrelated to their performance and military ability. [...]

The supposed “injury” to the military that the government claims would result from the district court’s injunction is, by the government’s own account, entirely a matter of rewriting handbooks and personnel manuals, developing training and “education” materials, reassuring serving personnel that their “views, concerns, and perspectives” are valued, and the like. These activities are not “irreparable injury” of the type that the test for a stay contemplates. Moreover, the government has known since June 2009, when the district court set this case for trial, that it might lose and have to adjust its policies accordingly. By contrast, the injury to Log Cabin’s members and to all American servicemembers from granting a stay is both immediate and truly irreparable, in a Constitutional sense, as the following section shows.

Also yesterday, four other LGBT groups including Servicemembers United, SLDN, the Palm Center and Lambada Legal filed amicus briefs urging the court should allow Judge Phillips’ injunction to stand until the case comes to appeal early next year. Interestingly, Lambda Legal’s brief argues that DADT’s discriminatory message is particularly damaging to lesbian, gay and bisexual youth, as exemplified by the surge of recently-reported teen suicides caused by antigay bullying. “The government cannot plausibly claim that its actions are unrelated to such tragedies and abuses, so long as it remains the nation’s leading model for open discrimination against LGB people,” it says.