After Anti-Gay Attack Ad Appeared In Campaign Houston Independent School District Consider Policy Prohibiting Board From Discrimination Based On Sexual Orientation, Wyoming High School Football Coach Removed After Distributing Anti-Gay “Hurt Feelings Report” To Team But Is Allowed To Continue Role As Councillor, Rejected Same Sex Marriage Robert Crumb New Yorker Cover Unearthed, Neil Patrick Harris And David Burtka Lunch With Their Twins, Justin Bieber In Paris France Flashing Underpants

Houston school trustees voted unanimously Thursday to work on changing their own ethics policy to ban themselves from discriminating based on sexuality. The decision came in response to a campaign advertisement from trustee Manuel Rodriguez Jr. that was criticized as anti-gay. The board's move, however, did not go far enough for some who called for Rodriguez to resign or for the board to censure him. The Houston Chronicle reports that face-to-face with Rodriguez, more than a dozen speakers delivered impassioned speeches against the ad, with some tearing up and pounding the speaker's podium. A small protest outside the meeting included a poster that read, "No Bully on HISD School Board." In the ad, Rodriguez, who narrowly won re-election to the board this week, urged voters to oppose his opponent because he supported gay rights and had a male partner and no children. Rodriguez voted with his colleagues to expand the ethics policy but made no public comments. He issued an apology Wednesday to those offended by the ad. "Are you going to help us stop the bullying or are you going to be a bully yourself?" Milby High School student Giovanny Castillo asked Rodriguez at the board meeting. Castillo, a senior, is the president of the school's Gay-Straight Alliance. Zeph Capo, an officer of the Houston Federation of Teachers union, urged Rodriguez to apologize to the students in his trustee district. "When they forgive you and they think it's sincere, then I'll forgive you," Capo said. "But not until then." HISD trustees Carol Mims Galloway and Juliet Stipeche spoke out against the ad at the packed board meeting, and trustee Anna Eastman made the motion to expand the ethics policy. Trustees plan to bring back a revised policy next month. "Living by the golden rule, we do not bully and we do not judge others for who they are," Stipeche said after reading the names of students who committed suicide after being bullied. Galloway said she would apologize on Rodriguez's behalf. She said she believed he supported the district's anti-discrimination policy. "But I guess when it comes to politics," she added, "people forget."

The resignation of Buffalo head football coach Pat Lynch was anything but simple, reports The Casper Star-Tribune. "None of us are happy that it happened. It's a black eye to the district. And it's a black eye to Pat." But in the aftermath, Johnson County School District 1 Wyoming superintendent Dr. Rod Kessler was supportive of Lynch and the efforts to repair his reputation. “[Lynch] screwed up, he screwed up big time,” Kessler said. “The coaching, we didn’t want that to be the issue anymore. We wanted him to have his priority back where it was as a counsellor. None of us are happy that it happened. It’s a black eye to the district. And it’s a black eye to Pat.” Lynch handed out an offensive survey, titled “Hurt Feelings Report,” that included sexist and anti-gay rhetoric before Buffalo’s first-round playoff game at Afton. The survey, under a list of reasons for hurt feelings, includes such choices as “I am a queer,” “I am a pussy,” “I am a little bitch,” and “I have woman like hormones.” It asks for the name of the “little sissy filing report” and his “girly-man signature,” plus the “real-man signature” of the person accused of causing hurt feelings. Lynch did not coach in either of the team’s playoff games, and the school board accepted his resignation as head football coach and weight room supervisor on Monday in a special session. The board did, however, allow Lynch to continue in his position of guidance counsellor at Buffalo High School, under administrative supervision. “We’re going to work with Pat and have him continue doing the good things he was doing prior to this mistake,” Kessler said. “Our hope is that we can mend things we need to mend and gain back the trust and get the reputation that he needs to gain back as a professional.” Lynch has been the head coach at Buffalo for the past 13-plus seasons and has coached the Bison to two state titles (2004 and‘05). He led the Bison to a 12th consecutive playoff appearance before his removal as head coach. Voicemail messages and other attempts to reach Lynch by phone have been unsuccessful. Kessler said had Buffalo advanced to Friday’s Class 3A state championship game — the Bison lost to Douglas 20-14 — the decision would have been managed the same way. The district does renew contracts on a yearly basis, and Kessler said they would wait until the spring time to discuss Lynch’s long-term status.

Robert Crumb, the alternative comic writer with a piggyback fetish, has always been ahead of his time. That’s what made his comics–usually featuring giant Amazonian women with humungous thighs as a chronic masturbatory fantasy– so transgressive to begin with. But for all his former subversiveness, Mr. Crumb is now considered mainstream. Maybe not New Yorker mainstream though: Vice magazine unearthed a 2009 drawing from the cartoonist that was rejected by David Remnick‘s magazine. Though an answer was never given on why the cover wasn’t run, Mr. Crumb suspects it was because the New Yorker was too afraid of offending people with the image of a (possible?) drag queen and a diminutive person of unidentifiable sex trying talking to a sweating official from the marriage license bureau, with a sign pointing to a “Genders Inspection” office next to his window. The cartoon was discovered at the Venice Biennale in June. Since Crumb has drawn for the New Yorker before (though now refuses to), it is doubtful that it was the cartoon’s then-scandalous content contributed to its rejection. The magazine just never ran a gay marriage cover drawing in 2009. If Crumb had submitted it this year, when gay marriage was actually passed in New York and the New Yorker featured a cartoon of two women walking down the aisle, it very well may have passed the politically correct test.

Cuteness alert: Neil Patrick Harris, David Burtka, and one-year-old twins Gideon and Harper spotted in Sherman Oaks Wednesday lunching at The Marmalade Cafe.

In Paris, it is another day, another sighting of Justin Bieber losing his belt-less pants.