If the district is guilty of anything, it would be exactly the opposite. It would be for tolerating a homophobic environment and bullying among students -- not for allowing King to be who he was.

The school must provide a safe environment for all.

Unless significant numbers of our K-12 students are getting married, school boards should say nothing on the matter.

School boards are charged with making school policy, period.

People who believe they can only safeguard their rights and privileges by denying those very same rights and privileges to others have embraced the ideology of Nazi-era Germany, apartheid-era South Africa and the Guantanamo Bay-era United States.

A gorilla at a zoo in the German city of Muenster is refusing to let go of her dead baby's body several days after it died of unknown causes.

Allwetter Zoo spokeswoman Ilona Zuehlke says the 3-month-old male baby died on Saturday but its 11-year-old mother continues to carry its body around.

An 85-year-old woman boldly went for her gun and busted a would-be burglar inside her home, then forced him to call police while she kept him in her sights, police said.

"I just walked right on past him to the bedroom and got my gun," Leda Smith said.

After the 17-year-old boy called 911, Smith kept holding the gun on him until state police arrived at her home in Springhill Township, about 45 miles south of Pittsburgh.

The family of an Oxnard eighth-grader who was shot by a classmate at school has filed personal injury claims against the school district and county, alleging that their failure to protect the boy led to his death.

Lawrence King, 15, was shot in the head Feb. 12 at E.O. Green Junior High School. At the time, he was a ward of Ventura County, a foster child living at Casa Pacifica, a shelter for abused and troubled children in Camarillo.

The claim filed by Lawrence's parents, Dawn and Gregory King, and his brother Rocky King last week alleges that the Hueneme School District did not enforce the school dress code and therefore failed to protect Lawrence from harm.

But according to its producers, the television spot is not about getting votes in the election. They say that the nonprofit corporation that put up millions of dollars to air it is simply trying to encourage tolerance of same-sex marriage.

Some experts believe that the ad's producer, Let California Ring, is skirting federal tax law, which restricts political campaigning by nonprofit organizations with tax-exempt status. By using such an entity, backers also avoid a fundamental requirement of state campaign finance law -- public disclosure of donors' identities.

Attorney Evan Wolfson of the New York group, Freedom to Marry, and a board member of Let California Ring, disagreed.

"Of course, it has a viewpoint," he said of the commercial. "But it is not a political viewpoint."

The ad, he said, "is untethered to any political moment, election year, political decision or vote. It is all about asking people how they would feel if they or their loved ones couldn't marry who they love."

But Schubert said his campaign lawyers had reviewed the spot and concluded that it would probably squeak by as legal.

Several of the donors named by the institution as its supporters are also major donors to the campaign against Proposition 8.

Philanthropist and technology entrepreneur David Bohnett said he donated $500,000 to air the Let California Ring ad and helped fund the group in the past.

James C. Hormel, former ambassador to Luxembourg, donated between $250,000 and $499,000 to Let California Ring. Hormel has given $150,000 to fight Proposition 8.

Two organizations that have political action arms -- the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Human Rights Campaign -- also have given between $250,000 and $499,000 to Equality California Institute. The two groups have spent a combined amount of more than $500,000 to defeat the initiative.

Doctors may not discriminate against gays and lesbians in medical treatment, even if the procedures being sought conflict with physicians' religious beliefs, the California Supreme Court decided today.

In the second, major gay-rights victory this year, the state high court said religious physicians must obey a state law that bars businesses from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.

The decision stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Guadalupe T. Benitez, an Oceanside lesbian who lives with her partner and wanted to become pregnant with donated sperm.

Benitez, 36, and now the mother of three, said she has been pursuing her case for 10 years.

"This isn't just a win for me personally and for other lesbian women," she said. "It's a win for everyone, because anyone could be the next target if doctors are allowed to pick and choose their patients based on religious views about other groups of people."

Kenneth R. Pedroza, who represented the doctors, predicted that many doctors would simply refuse to do the insemination procedure at all.

At a Democratic presidential forum on gay issues last year, the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart prefaced a question to Sen. Barack Obama this way: "Now, you and I both know that there's a homophobia problem in the black community."

That notion will be put to the test Nov. 4, when black voters in California -- expected to turn out in record numbers to support Obama -- also will face a proposition to put a ban on same-sex marriage in the state Constitution.

Across the country, black voters repeatedly reelect African American politicians who support gay rights.

Obama, for his part, hasn't backed marriage for gays, but he did call Proposition 8 "divisive and discriminatory," whereas John McCain supports it.

Nonetheless, we can expect leaders of the religious right such as James Dobson and Tony Perkins to feature African American ministers prominently in their campaign to end gay and lesbian weddings in California.

It's a cynical strategy.

Too often the media have played along.

Opposition to gay rights takes culturally specific forms, and Capehart was right, of course, that there is "a homophobia problem in the black community." But it's no worse than the homophobia problem in America that belongs to all of us.

When a closeted gay man, marry's your daughter and after 10 years breaks her heart when he finally "comes out" and leaves her (or worse) -- do not complain. If they dont marry each other, they will marry our daughters.

You're confusing "Gay Rights" with "Marriage". Proponents of Prop 8 endorse the existing civil unions for same-sex couples. We are opposed to removing the right of children to be raised, whenever possible, by both of their natural parents. GLBT civil rights are already protected. We are opposed to the deliberate, casual creation of children whose destiny does not include knowing their real parents. Google "genetic orphans" to learn of victims orphaned from birth not through tragedy, but deliberately by the people who claim to "love" them. Proposition 8 is about CHILDREN'S RIGHTS.

Prop 8 is NOT about Children's Rights. Stop using children to promote a heterosexist worldview.

Children riased in loving and caring homes is what is most important.

Raising children in a heterosexual household doesn't guarentee anything.

If this is about the kids, why not try to pass a law banning giving kids up for adoption? Why not ban adoption period?

Most gay couples who want kids can have them without adopting children!

Go after their retched STRAIGHT parents who gave them up and leave us GAY people alone!!

You dismiss the opinion that the health of our children and society is based on the success of the traditional family unit. However, marriage and family were not invented by our Constitution or laws, merely recognized by them.

Marriage's root is in the creation and nurturing of new life in the only way that it can naturally occur -- between a man and a woman.

Many of us have family members and friends who have same-sex attraction. We want them to be happy and fulfilled. Nevertheless, most of us recognize that the perpetuation of the human race can only come from a man and a woman.

The disingenuous attempt to portray [licensed same-sex] marriage as an "existing constitutional right," as if we rubes don't know the so-called right was created by a clever move by the California Supreme Court less than three months ago, is three-card monte.

Marriage has been consistently defined as a union between a man and a woman for more than 6,000 years, and no amount of sleight of hand by The Times or the Supreme Court can change it.

The American Psychiatric Assn. has confirmed that sexual orientation is natural, biologically induced, morally neutral, immutable, neither contagious nor learned and has no relation to an individual's ability to form deep and lasting relationships, to parent children, to work or to contribute to society.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Assn., the American Psychoanalytic Assn. and the American Psychiatric Assn. have all endorsed civil marriage for same-sex couples because marriage strengthens the mental and physical health of couples and provides greater legal and financial security for children, parents and seniors.

Laws should not be based on personal or religious ideas.

New condominium projects in neighborhoods such as Brentwood, Studio City and other affluent parts of Los Angeles could be required to include units for very poor people if the City Council approves a new housing plan as expected today.

The commitment to a so-called inclusionary zoning law, which has been a contentious topic in Los Angeles for years, is part of a comprehensive housing plan that the city must adopt to be eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars in state housing bond funds.

Advocates for the poor hail the plan as a significant symbolic move.

"The city is taking a huge step forward in figuring out how to address the housing crisis," said Peter Kuhns, an organizer for the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a group of low-income residents.

American businesswoman Veronica was stepping out of her car in California when two men forced her into the passenger seat at gunpoint, pushed her teenage daughter into the back and drove them into Mexico.

Taking advantage of lax Mexican security at the San Diego border, and with U.S. authorities focused mainly on those entering the United States, the kidnappers took the two women to Tijuana in January and held them for a month before their family paid a $100,000 ransom.

"We have seen an increase in the number of kidnappings of U.S. citizens in Tijuana, including cross-border abductions," said FBI special agent Darrell Foxworth in San Diego.

Several Americans have also been kidnapped in Texas this year and held for ransom in Mexico, the FBI said.

The boom that turned swamps and pastures into a suburban mecca has stopped dead. Now the talk is about plummeting home values, rising food costs, and gas prices that make the once-painless half-hour commute to Tampa a financial strain. It's enough to give some here the sense that maybe, this time around, the Republicans do not deserve their votes.

Dori Merkle, 50, who works as a special education instructor in the local schools, said her collapsing home value was pushing her to consider voting Democratic for the first time in her life.

Another neighbor, Cheryl Bernales, a 29-year-old economics teacher who voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, said that she could face a pay cut "because the economy's so bad," and that she believes Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama "isn't so entrenched in the system."

Since Bush was reelected in 2004, according to a Times analysis, the average cost of gas to drive both ways of the 26-mile commute between the Wrencrest subdivision and downtown Tampa in a typical passenger car has more than doubled, from $4.36 to $9.22.

Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, says that many young families that moved to exurbia since 2000 racked up credit card debt and took on big mortgages. Now, he said, "if they're upside down on their mortgage, they'll be looking for someone to blame."

Republicans also appear to be losing ground in voter registration.

Obama's top strategists have identified issues that they believe will sway a voting bloc that often includes parents of young children: job security, public schools and the cost of college, said deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand.

"History tells us that it takes quite a bit of economic pain to cause traditionally conservative voters to shift candidates," said John D. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina's business school who has studied demographic patterns in suburbs.

Alex Deeb, who owns several construction companies, said he "couldn't build houses fast enough" in Bush's first term. But now, one of his firms just laid off 10 workers.

It's the same sentence as in 2000: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Yet the issue that will be put before voters Nov. 4 is radically different.

This time, the wording would be used to rescind an existing constitutional right to marry.

We fervently hope that voters, whatever their personal or religious convictions, will shudder at such a step and vote no on Proposition 8.

The state of [neutering] marriage shifted in May, when the California Supreme Court overturned Proposition 22, the [affirmation of] marriage that voters approved eight years ago, and ruled that marriage was a fundamental right under the state Constitution.

Proposition 8 seeks to embed wording in the Constitution that would eliminate the fundamental right to…marriage.

It's a rare and drastic step, invoking the constitutional-amendment process to strip people of rights.

All the more reason for voters to weigh carefully what would be wrought by this measure.

In a meeting with The Times' editorial board, supporters argued at length that children are best off when raised by their own biological, married mothers and fathers. Even if that were true -- and there is much room for dispute -- this measure in no way moves society closer to such a traditional picture.

Gay and lesbian couples already are raising their own children and will continue to do so, as will single parents and adoptive and blended families.

Using the supporters' own reasoning, it would be better for same-sex parents to marry.

Still, there are differences. Some are statutory -- domestic partners must share a residence, while married couples can live separately

-- and others are pragmatic -- studies have found that domestic partners do not receive the same treatment or recognition from hospital staff, employers and the public as spouses do.

But it was Ronald M. George, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who cut through to the essence of the issue in the May 15 opinion he wrote: "[A]ffording same-sex couples only a separate and differently named family relationship will, as a realistic matter, impose appreciable harm on same-sex couples and their children, because denying such couples access to the familiar and highly favored designation of marriage is likely to cast doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples."

In other words, the very act of denying gay and lesbian couples the right to marry -- traditionally the highest legal and societal recognition of a loving commitment -- by definition relegates them and their relationships to second-class status, separate and not all that equal.

Whites in the South vehemently rejected the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. For that matter, Californians have accused the state Supreme Court of obstructing the people's will on marriage before -- in 1948, when it struck down a ban on interracial marriages.

Fundamental rights are exactly that.

Still, tensions were evident between liberal bishops from North America and conservative ones from the "Global South." The archbishop of Sudan demanded the resignation of Gene Robinson, the openly gay New Hampshire bishop whose ordination in 2003 was the casus belli of the crisis. A female bishop from the United States suggested that "many of our bishops come from places where it is culturally accepted to beat your wife."

The dispute among Anglicans may seem a strictly religious argument, turning on whether biblical prohibitions of homosexuality should be interpreted literally or softened, as scriptural condemnations of divorce have been without much protest from conservatives.

In the culture wars, there is no separation of church and state.

"It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called "S" corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.

"Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code," Edwards said.

It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.

About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

"It's time for the big corporations to pay their fair share," Dorgan said.