Last night, Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School Board voted to approve a “Respectful Learning Environment” curriculum policy that will finally allow faculty and staff to affirm LGBT students’ identities. It replaces the troublesome “neutrality” policy that prevented school officials from discussing sexual orientation, thereby creating a toxic environment for students who went unprotected from anti-gay bullying.

The Southern Poverty Law Center praised the change, but said it plans to proceed with the suits it has filed on behalf of students who were subject to harassment under the policy:

Today is the first day in nearly 18 years that Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District no longer has a harmful policy that singles out lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. Although we would have preferred for the District to have repealed this stigmatizing policy without replacing it, we are pleased that the new policy expressly requires district staff to affirm the dignity and self-worth of all students, including LGBT students.

The repeal of this policy is an important first step, but the District must do much more to create a safe, welcoming, and respectful learning environment for all students, including LGBT and gender non-conforming students, and those perceived as such.

Rolling Stone magazine recently profiled the district and the trauma students have experienced, particularly losing friends to suicide. School officials called the portrayal “grossly distorted” and attempted to downplay the negative environment, refusing to take any responsibility for the impact of the “neutrality” policy. The Parents Action League, a radical group of conservative parents that promotes ex-gay therapy and calls AIDS a gay disease, continues to object to the school “caving” to the “demands of the homosexual activists.”

Minnesotans United for All Families — a coalition opposing the state’s proposed anti-gay constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman — has discovered that proponents of inequality are having a hard time finding Minnesotans who oppose same-sex marriage. Yesterday, the anti-gay group released its first video of 2012, but rather than interviewing actual residents of the state, the commercial is “full of stock images“:

We tracked down the phony stock images of families that they used in their video, and we think you deserve to see the proof. Check them out:

1. Children Having Fun in Playground Together
2. Loving and Playful Family
3. Happy Bride and Groom Smiling Together
4. Happy, Smiling Family
5. A house, also found on a securities website
6. And last but not least, this couple, who are also prominently featured on a website for a hospital in India!

Watch the video:

Relying on stock images is a fairly common practice in political campaigns, but anti-gay groups who argue that the public supports their view of “traditional marriage” seem particularly drawn to fake representations of families.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton (D) suggested that Republicans should abandon a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding former Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch (R). Earlier this month, following rumors of an an alleged affair with a male Senate staffer who reported to Koch, “the Republican from Buffalo resigned her leadership post and announced she would not seek re-election.”

“I think it underscores that sanctity of marriage is important to most Minnesotans and people who are in same-sex relationships believe in that sanctity also and want a chance to participate in the sanctity in the same way as heterosexual couples,” Dayton told MPR’s All Things Considered, before suggesting that Republicans would be hypocritical in pursuing the measure:

DAYTON: I will say, before you take out the speck in your neighbor’s eye, take the log out of your own eye. Somebody whose conduct doesn’t measure up to what they’re professing to believe in or prescribing for others, then they should be called on that.

Listen:

Yesterday, the gay community in Minnesota sent Koch a mock letter apologizing “for ruining the institution of marriage and causing her to stray from her husband and engage in an ‘inappropriate relationship.’” “On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage,” reads the letter from John Medeiros. “We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.”

Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt is asking Catholics to recite a “special prayer” condemning the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, the Star Tribune is reporting. The request is just the latest effort in the archdiocese’s campaign to whip up support against the state’s pending constitutional amendement to outlaw marriage equality. The prayer explains that marriage is “a source of blessing and joy,” before asking parishioners to deny this happiness to gay people:

Heavenly Father,

Through the powerful intercession of the Holy Family, grant to this local Church the many graces we need to foster, strengthen, and support faith-filled, holy marriages and holy families. May the vocation of married life, a true calling to share in your own divine and creative life, be recognized by all believers as a source of blessing and joy, and a revelation of your own divine goodness. Grant to us all the gift of courage to proclaim and defend your plan for marriage, which is the union of one man and one woman in a lifelong, exclusive relationship of loving trust, compassion, and generosity, open to the conception of children.

We make our prayer through Jesus Christ, who is Lord forever and ever. Amen.

In October, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis called on priests to appoint special committees to “spearhead this effort at the local level” so as to prevent a “detriment to the common good of society.” The Catholic Conference is one of three arms of “Minneosta for Marriage,” the coalition advocating for the discriminatory amendment. In a joint statement, the MCC and Archdiocese proclaimed that anyone who does not support the amendment is not in “good standing” with the church, although Catholics largely support marriage equality, even at higher rates than the general public in some polls.

Fortunately, the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, has passed a resolution opposing the proposed constitutional amendment, explaining, “The Episcopal Church in Minnesota has always stood with the marginalized” and “embraced both the Gospel mandate of love of neighbor and the Baptismal Covenant imperative to respect the dignity of every human being.”