I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
EAST LANSING — A Web site tied to a group aimed at turning homosexuals into heterosexuals was finally taken offline by Michigan State University this week, almost a year after it was supposed to be shut down.
An administrative oversight left the controversial Web site on MSU servers until Tuesday morning, officials said. The server, like all MSU programs, is taxpayer-funded. The Web site was a fund-raising and informational site for Corduroy Stone Ministries, which is affiliated with Exodus International, a program designed to re-orient gays. The site offered a variety of services it said would help gays change.
“I’m deeply concerned about this oversight. I support the university moving as quickly as possible to close down the Corduroy StoneWeb site, ” said Brent Bilodeau, director of the MSU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center. “Its presence is unacceptable. The site is not consistent with our technology acceptable-use policy. It also promotes a practice related to LGBT identity development that is not credible and inappropriate for use at MSU.”
MSU officials were quick Monday to move to shut down the site.
Continued -“Since we no longer sell accounts to off-campus entities, I believe we have every right to ‘expire’ the account if we wish,” Tom Davis, director of academic computing and network services at MSU, wrote in an e-mail Monday to MSU spokesman Terry Denbow. The e-mail was released by Denbow, who originally said the site had been removed already. When contacted Friday about the site remaining on MSU servers, Denbow denied it. But Monday, tech staff at the university told him otherwise.
In response to Davis’ e-mail, David Gift, vice provost for libraries, computing and technology, responded: “Here’s the most relevant email from our prior discussion of the cstone-referring site. Let’s take it down.”
According to Davis’ e-mail, the site was purchased Dec. 8, 1997, and had been operational since. The Web site came to light in June 2007 when Between the Lines, Michigan’s gay and lesbian newspaper, discovered it linked on a Web site advertised on a banner flown over the Motor City Pride event in Ferndale. In a story published last June 14, Mike Jones, a retired MSU employee who calls himself an “ex-gay,” said he had purchased the site.
In that June 14 issue, MSU officials had promised to remove the site. And communications released by Denbow show Vice Provost Gift, who would have overseen that, thought the issue had been resolved in June.
Cross-posted at Pridesource.com.
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