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.
Last week, voters in Kalamazoo passed the city’s new anti-discrimination ordinance. This week, city employees are figuring out how to implement it. According to a story in Sunday’s Kalamazoo Gazette, the city’s new protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity require that individuals alleging discrimination file a written complaint with the city manager.
Ordinance 1856, the Kalamazoo city referendum that prohibits discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, looks like it’s going to pass. The Kalamazoo Gazette reports that with 15 of 19 precincts reporting in, there are 6333 yes votes and 4007 no votes.
If any of the undecided voters in Kalamazoo are New York Times subscribers, then supporters of the anti-discrimination ordinance on the ballot tomorrow just got a nice boost.
The new TV ad from opponents of Kalamazoo’s anti-discrimination ordinance serves to highlight the starkly different way both sides in this fight characterize it – supporters saying it promotes basic fairness and equality, opponents saying it opens the bathroom and locker-room door to “cross-dressing men.”
While Kalamazoo’s proposed Ordinance 1856 would bar discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, it’s the second category that has generated the most controversy.
The editors of the Kalamazoo Gazette on Sunday endorsed Ordinance 1856, the human rights ordinance that will be voted on in that city on Nov. 3. That ordinance, being advocated by an organization called One Kalamazoo, would prohibit discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The [...]
On Nov. 3, Kalamazoo’s large African-American vote may well decide the fate of the current push to expand local anti-discrimination protections.
KALAMAZOO — Rev. Douglas Vernon’s Methodist congregation is one of only a handful of local churches that have embraced the proposed Ordinance 1856, an initiative on Kalamazoo’s Nov. 3 ballot initiative that seeks to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. That makes his Methodist church a surprising exception to the often predictable rule of religious divisions over such proposals: liberal denominations and churches supporting them, conservative ones against.
In response to a question posed by The Advocate magazine, the White House has thrown its support behind two of the three major gay-rights ballot initiatives voters will face on November 3 – Maine’s up-or-down vote on upholding same-sex marriage, and Washington state’s up-or-down vote on domestic partnerships. But there was no mention of Kalamazoo’s anti-discrimination [...]
KALAMAZOO — With the constant din of volunteers talking and phones ringing behind him, City Commissioner David Anderson sat on a metal folding chair at campaign headquarters and explained his reluctant entry into the battle over a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance in this southwest Michigan city. “I didn’t run to work on this issue,” he said, [...]
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