* Indiana…

The Indiana Supreme Court has denied the rehearing request by abortion advocates after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the pending abortion ban is constitutional. […]

With this move, Indiana is likely days away from the abortion restrictions passed in August 2022 from taking effect. The ban will take effect as soon as their June 30 ruling is certified by the Appellate Clerk. […]

Under the new law, there are four abortion exceptions — rape, incest, life and physical health of the mother, and lethal fetal anomalies.

Rape or incest exemptions will need to be performed 10 weeks before post-fertilization. In the case of the life of a mother or lethal fetal anomalies, women will have up to 20 weeks post-fertilization for an abortion.

* Idaho’s loss is Illinois’ gain…

When Karen Lauritzen was named the 2023 Idaho Teacher of the Year last September, she was hoping it would be her best school year yet. Instead, she said, it turned out to be one of the worst in her two decades teaching — and, she decided by the summer, her last.

Despite her selection by a Republican administration after a rigorous application process, her nomination was met with attacks on her character from conservative outlets in the state, accusing her of “promoting transgenderism” and being a “left-wing activist,” smears that carried into her fourth-grade classroom in the form of sudden suspicions about her from parents in her school.

Lauritzen, 44, is still the reigning teacher of the year, but she is no longer teaching elementary school or even living in Idaho. Instead she is taking her talents to a university in Illinois, a long-considered career move hastened by the experience. […]

The day after she was announced as Idaho Teacher of the Year, Lauritzen was accused by conservative outlets in her state of being a “left-wing activist” because she had expressed support for the LGBTQ+ community and Black Lives Matter on her personal social media accounts. Though the outlets offered no evidence linking her personal views to her classroom instruction, parents in her rural western Idaho community began emailing and confronting her with questions. Some accused her of teaching fourth-graders inappropriate content, even though no discussion of sexuality was in her curriculum and was already prohibited by her school district. Her own global interests often inspired her teaching, but Lauritzen said she faced complaints from parents about a lesson on some worldwide cultures who eat insects, and even objections to students learning about the United Nations.

“When it’s, ‘My kid can’t do this because it’s propaganda,’ and ‘My kid can’t do that because we don’t believe in United Nations,’ it’s like, what? It’s not Santa Claus, what do you mean you don’t believe in it?” Lauritzen said. “Even if I have certain beliefs myself, that does not mean that I teach kids. It’s not my job to ‘indoctrinate’ or make kids little versions of myself. It’s to make kids into the best versions of themselves.”

* Arkansas…

The six Arkansas schools that planned to offer an Advanced Placement (AP) course on African American studies say they will continue to do so despite state officials saying the class will not count toward a student’s graduation credit.

The North Little Rock and Jacksonville North Pulaski school districts and eStem charter schools said on Thursday they would offer the course as a “local elective” despite the Arkansas education department saying it is not considered a state-approved course. They join two other school districts that have said they will continue offering the class. […]

The state, however, has said that schools can still offer the course and it can count toward a student’s grade-point average. […]

The Little Rock school district on Wednesday said it planned to continue teaching the course at Central high, site of the historic 1957 racial desegregation crisis. Central is one of six schools in the state that had been slated to offer the course this year. The Jonesboro school district told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette it also planned to continue offering the course.

* Missouri…

The Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law requiring school attendance after two Lebanon, Missouri, parents were sentenced to jail following excessive absences by their children.

Court documents indicated that during the 2021-2022 academic year, a first-grade student missed nine days of school, while a kindergartner missed seven days without any explanation. […]

The two mothers, Caitlyn Williams and Tamarae Larue, took their case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the state law mandating “regular” attendance lacks clarity. […]

Williams received a one-week jail sentence for her first grader’s attendance, while Tamarae Larue was sentenced to 15 days in jail for her kindergartner’s attendance. Larue later agreed to serve on a two-year probation. […]

“I don’t know that jailing parents — and these were both single moms, I want to point out — taking them out of their households and away from their children, when the issue is the children attending school,” [Family law attorney Susan Guthrie] said. “I think the ends are not justified by the needs.”

* Texas…

The Justice Department scoffed Thursday at Texas’ assertion it’s free to install anti-migrant buoys in the Rio Grande, regardless of treaties and federal law, because “Texas purportedly is being ‘invaded’” by migrants.

“Whether and when an `invasion’ occurs is a matter of foreign policy and national defense, which the Constitution specifically commits to the federal government,” the Justice Department argued.

A federal judge in Austin will hear arguments Tuesday as the Biden administration tries to force Gov. Greg Abbott to remove the $850,000 floating barrier deployed near Eagle Pass last month. […]

The evidence includes a survey showing that Texas put most of the buoys on the wrong side of the border, and excerpts from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, where Mexico gave up its claims to Texas three years after statehood.

* North Carolina…

Transgender youth in North Carolina lost access Wednesday to gender-affirming medical treatments after the Republican-led General Assembly overrode the governor’s vetoes of that legislation and other bills touching on gender in sports and LGBTQ+ instruction in the classroom.

GOP supermajorities in the House and Senate enacted — over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s opposition — a bill barring medical professionals from providing hormone therapy, puberty-blocking drugs and surgical gender-transition procedures to anyone under 18, with limited exceptions.

The law takes effect immediately. But minors who had begun treatment before Aug. 1 may continue receiving that care if their doctors deem it medically necessary and their parents consent.

North Carolina becomes the 22nd state to enact legislation restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. But most face legal challenges, and local LGBTQ+ rights advocates vow to take the ban to court. The Senate voted 27-18 to complete the veto override after the House voted 74-45 earlier. Two House Democrats joined all present Republicans in supporting the override bid.

* Florida…

This year, Florida lawmakers made national headlines for approving anti-LGBTQ+ measures. And as those laws went into effect, they have pushed a majority of transgender Floridians to consider leaving the state, according to results of a survey released Thursday morning.

The survey, co-sponsored and released by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, found that four of five transgender people wanted — or were planning — to leave Florida for another state or country because of gender-affirming care bans. More than 93% stated that they feel less safe now than they did before the laws. […]

Almost 80% of trans people — and 45% of other LGBTQ+ adults — reported that bans on gender-affirming care affect their or their loved ones’ physical or mental health.

More than 80% of trans people — and more than 76% of other LGBTQ+ adults — felt that bans on gender-affirming care worsen stereotypes, discrimination, hate and stigma.

* Oklahoma…

After two failed efforts in the state legislature to define a woman and a man based on their sex assigned at birth, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order limiting those definitions, the latest blow to transgender rights in the state.

The order, which along with government agencies applies to schools and state institutions, stipulates definitions for certain terms, like “man,” “boy,” “woman,” “girl,” “father,” and “mother.” The narrow definitions in the so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” exclude trans and nonbinary people or anyone whose gender does not fit into the binary categories of woman or man. The order’s language does not make room for those with chromosomal variations, like intersex people. […]

Nicole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, said the directive is “neither about rights, nor is it about protecting women.”

It “instead opens the door for further civil rights violations that open all women to being harassed and targeted as they have their femininity assessed and judged by a public who feels increased permission to police gender,” they said.

* Kentucky, Mississippi and Virginia…

Voters in the South will elect dozens of local prosecutors this November. But the proceedings are overshadowed by Southern state governments’ escalating maneuvers to undercut the will of voters in prosecutor races—fueled in part by Republican anger against some prosecutors’ policies of not enforcing low-level charges and new abortion bans.

Mississippi this year removed predominantly white sections of Hinds County, the majority-Black county that’s home to Jackson, from the control of its Black district attorney. Georgia reacted similarly to recent wins by DAs of color: It cut off a white county from a circuit that had elected a Black prosecutor, and also set up a new state agency with the power to fire DAs. Last week, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Orlando’s elected Democratic prosecutor, citing disagreements with her office’s approach to prosecution, one year after he similarly replaced Tampa’s Democratic prosecutor with a member of the Federalist Society. […]

Still, the electoral cycle churns on. There will be 123 local prosecutor races across Kentucky, Mississippi, and Virginia—the only three Southern states voting on this office in 2023.

The lion’s share is in Virginia, a state that may soon experience its own version of this dynamic. Republican officials have wanted to crack down on reform prosecutors but have not been able to push their proposals through so far; they may try again in 2024 if they gain the legislature. In the meantime, these policy debates are playing out in a more usual place—the electoral arena. […]

Mississippi also features challenges to three Democratic prosecutors who have, to varying degrees, implemented some priorities of criminal justice reformers, such as expanding alternatives to incarceration or vowing to not prosecute abortion cases. Their opponents have indicated that they wish to reel back some of these efforts.

* Georgia…

A Georgia school board voted along party lines Thursday to fire a teacher after officials said she improperly read a book on gender fluidity to her fifth grade class.

The Cobb County School Board in suburban Atlanta voted 4-3 to fire Katie Rinderle, overriding the recommendation of a panel of three retired educators. The panel found after a two-day hearing that Rinderle had violated district policies, but said she should not be fired.

She had been a teacher for 10 years when she got into trouble in March for reading the picture book “My Shadow Is Purple” by Scott Stuart at Due West Elementary School, after which some parents complained. […]

Cobb County adopted a rule barring teaching on controversial issues in 2022, after Georgia lawmakers earlier that year enacted laws barring the teaching of “divisive concepts” and creating a parents’ bill of rights. The divisive concepts law, although it addresses teaching on race, bars teachers from “espousing personal political beliefs.” The bill of rights guarantees that parents have “the right to direct the upbringing and the moral or religious training of his or her minor child.”

Rinderle is believed to be the first public school teacher in Georgia to be fired because of the laws. None of the board members discussed the decision, but school district lawyer Sherry Culves said at the hearing that discussing gender identity and gender fluidity was inappropriate.