Superintendent Jim McIntyre told the county school board on Wednesday the school system was working on the matter before a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Knox County and Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County school systems for denying access.

The Knoxville News Sentinel quoted McIntyre saying blocking the sites was not in compliance with Knox County’s policy and the system worked with Internet service provider ENA to allow access to the sites from school computers.

The lawsuit names Knox County Schools and Metropolitan Nashville Schools and was filed on behalf of two high school students in Nashville, one student in Knoxville and a high school librarian in Knoxville who is also the advisor of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA).

Students at Knox County and Metro Nashville schools and others are being denied access to content that is protected speech under the First Amendment as well as the Tennessee state constitution, the lawsuit says.

Students who need to do research for assignments on current events can only get one viewpoint, keeping them from being able to cover both sides of the issue.

When public schools only allow access to one side of an issue by blocking certain websites, they’re engaging in illegal viewpoint discrimination, the ACLU said.

No federal or state law requires school districts to block access to LGBT sites. Tennessee law only requires schools to implement filtering software to restrict information that is obscene or harmful to minors.

The ACLU said that as many as 107 Tennessee public school districts, or roughly 80 percent, could be illegally preventing students from accessing online information about LGBT issues.

While non-sexual websites advocating the fair treatment of LGBT people are blocked, websites that urge LGBT persons to change their sexual orientation or gender identity through so-called “reparative therapy” or “ex-gay” ministries can still be easily accessed by students, the ACLU said.

Andrew Emitt, a 17-year-old senior at Central High School in Knoxville, was at the school library searching for scholarships for LGBT students when he discovered he couldn’t access websites for non-profit advocacy and educational organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Instead of the websites, a message appeared on his screen stating that the filtering software his school used blocked gay websites. Frustrated in his attempts to resolve the issue on his own, Andrew contacted ACLU-TN.

The ACLU sent a letter to the school districts last month warning them they were illegally preventing students from accessing online information about LGBT issues.

The letter demanded that Knox County Schools, Metro Nashville Public Schools, and the Tennessee Schools Cooperative unblock the Internet filtering category designated “LGBT” so that students can access political and educational information about LGBT issues on school computers.

The lawsuit was filed when the school districts did not respond.

Jo T. Rittenberry, 46, was born a man and claims to have had sex reassignment surgery in Canada. The Clarksville Leaf Chronicle reported that she had officials legally change the gender on her Kentucky birth certificate and Tennessee driver’s license.

Rittenberry married Jeffery Scott Phillips, 36, in November 2007.

Kelly Farmer, director of communications at the Davidson County Clerk’s Office, said Tennessee authorities will not honor the marriage because Rittenberry was not born a woman.

Tennessee does not permit same-sex marriage and does not recognize gender change even after sex reassignment surgery.

“The marriage is real to me,” said Rittenberry, also known as Terri Jo Colby. “It wasn’t anything planned to be deceptive. I’m not gay, and Jeff ain’t either.”

The Canadian clinic where Rittenberry claims to have had gender reassignment surgery says she was a patient there but no operation was performed. Rittenberry disputes that.

Authorities began raising questions of gender after Rittenberry was booked into jail in March, charged with domestic assault against a relative and criminal impersonation stemming from allegations of credit card fraud.

Montgomery Sheriff’s Department spokesman Ted Denny told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Rittenberry is being housed with men and was patted down by both male and female officers because Rittenberry has breasts and male genitalia.

The letter demands that Knox County Schools, Metro Nashville Public Schools, and the Tennessee Schools Cooperative unblock the Internet filtering category designated “LGBT” so that students can access political and educational information about LGBT issues on school computers.

“When I found out about this web filtering software, I wasn’t looking for anything sexual or inappropriate – I was looking for information about scholarships for LGBT students, and I couldn’t get to it because of this software,” said Andrew Emitt, a 17-year-old senior at Central High School in Knoxville, in a statement released by the ACLU.

“Our schools shouldn’t be keeping students in the dark about LGBT organizations and resources,” Emitt said.

In its letter, the ACLU gives the districts and the Tennessee Schools Cooperative until April 29 to come up with a plan to restore access to the LGBT sites or any other category that blocks non-sexual websites advocating the fair treatment of LGBT people by the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year.

If that deadline is not met, the ACLU will file a lawsuit, the letter warned.

“Students at Knox County and Metro Nashville schools are being denied access to content that is protected speech under the First Amendment as well as the Tennessee state constitution,” said Tricia Herzfeld, Staff Attorney with the ACLU of Tennessee.

“This kind of censorship does nothing but hurt students, whether they’re being harassed at school and want to know about their legal rights or are just trying to finish an assignment for a class.”

The Internet filtering software used by Knox County and Metro Nashville school districts blocks student access to the websites of many well-known national LGBT organizations, including: Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network; the Human Rights Campaign; The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; Dignity USA; Marriage Equality USA; and the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry.

In its demand letter, the ACLU notes that websites that urge LGBT persons to change their sexual orientation or gender identity through so-called “reparative therapy” or “ex-gay” ministries – a practice denounced as dangerous and harmful to young people by such groups as the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics – can still be easily accessed by students.

“One of the problems with this software is that it only allows students access to one side of information about topics that are part of the public debate right now, like marriage for same-sex couples,” said Karyn Storts-Brinks, a librarian at Fulton High School in Knoxville.

“Students who need to do research for assignments on current events can only get one viewpoint, keeping them from being able to cover both sides of the issue.  That’s not fair and can hinder their schoolwork,” she said.

No federal or state law requires school districts to block access to LGBT sites.  Tennessee law only requires schools to implement filtering software to restrict information that is obscene or harmful to minors.

About 80 percent of Tennessee public schools, including those in the Knox County and Metro Nashville districts, use filtering software provided by Education Networks of America, and the software’s default setting blocks sites ENA categorizes as LGBT the ACLU said.

The ACLU said it believes that most of the 107 Tennessee school districts that use ENA’s filtering software keep the LGBT category blocked.  ENA blocks access to a wide category of “LGBT” sites described on the organization’s website as ” Sites that provide information regarding, support, promote, or cater to one’s sexual orientation or gender identity including but not limited to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender sites.

“When public schools only allow access to one side of an issue by blocking certain websites, they’re engaging in illegal viewpoint discrimination,” said Hedy Weinberg, Executive Director of the ACLU of Tennessee.

“Over a hundred other school districts in Tennessee use the same filtering software used in Metro Nashville and Knox County, and we’re eager to find out whether any of those systems are also violating students’ Constitutional rights by restricting access to LGBT sites.”

Prosecutors opened their case file Thursday on Jim David Adkisson, 58, who pleaded guilty a month ago to killing two people and wounding six others at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. The file includes interviews with investigators and a suicide note Adkisson left in his car.

Now serving a life sentence, Adkisson told police during an hour-long interrogation three hours after the July 27 shooting that he was unemployed, depressed and ready to take his anger out on what he called “an ultra-liberal” church that “never met a pervert they just didn’t embrace.”

“They just glory (in) these weirdos and sickos and homos,” he said in an interview recorded by investigators.

He also railed against the Unitarian Church: “That ain’t a church, that’s a damned cult,” Adkisson said.

The Knoxville church said in a statement Thursday that the congregation was still healing and that many hoped Adkisson would also “be healed of whatever motivated his actions.”

Adkisson walked into the church, pulled a sawed-off shotgun from a guitar case and fired into a congregation of about 230 people watching a children’s musical performance.

He expected police would kill him. Instead, church members wrestled him to the ground.

Recorded calls to Knox County’s 911 Center proved the panic and rapid response by church members. Just four minutes after the first 911, a police officer reports Adkisson is in custody.

Shortly after a woman caller told dispatchers of the attack, a man calling from the church reported that worshipers had disarmed the attacker and weren’t about to let him go.

“They may beat him to death, but they’ve got him,” the caller said.

Adkisson left a four-page suicide note in his SUV in the church parking lot. In it, he described the attack as “a hate crime,” “a political protest” and “a symbolic killing.”

He railed against extending constitutional rights to terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, about the news media being “the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party,” and how he would like to kill every major Democrat in Congress. But he said they were inaccessible and decided to go after “the foot soldiers, the (expletive) liberals that vote in these traitorous people.”

Adkisson concluded, “I’d like to encourage other like-minded people to do what I’ve done. If life ain’t worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. Do something for your country before you go. Go kill liberals.”

Adkisson told police he had never attended the church. But his fifth wife, Liza Alexander, who divorced him in 2000, had attended the church and convinced him to work as a counselor at Unitarian youth camps.

“I was in a marriage and I loved this woman, but she was just … I’d never been around somebody that liberal in my life,” he said.

Before she divorced him, Alexander got a protection order, claiming Adkisson threatened “to blow my brains out and then blow his own brains out,” according to file documents.

Catherine Murray, who was friends with the couple, told police Adkisson had drug and alcohol problems and “basically was afraid of anybody or anything that was not like him.”

Adkisson had worked a series of industrial jobs, including as a pipe worker at a Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear plant and on the Saturn Corp. auto assembly line, until 2006.

He complained in his suicide note and later in his interview with police that he was always being laid off and his prospects were growing slim as he got older. Again, he blamed liberals and Democrats.

He entered the church with 50 shotgun cartridges. He told police he planned to kill every adult in the sanctuary, but would spare the children because they also were “victims.”

“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” said Adkisson, an Air Force veteran. “I hope I start a movement.”

Adkisson told interrogators he was “crazy” and depressed but had never been diagnosed. His lawyer has said Adkisson rebuffed attempts to pursue an insanity defense.

“I just did what I did today,” Adkisson said. “See if you’d met me in a bar … on a street, you’d say, ‘Well, that’s a nice fellow.’ And I am.”

Jim D. Adkisson, 58, had been scheduled to stand trial next month, likely claiming an insanity defense, but his public defender said last week his client changed his mind.

After Adkisson entered his plea, Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

Adkisson was accused of pulling a sawed-off shotgun from a guitar case on July 27, 2008, and firing three deadly blasts into an audience watching a Sunday morning children’s performance of the musical “Annie.” Members of the audience of about 200 subdued him.

Police say Adkisson targeted the church because of its liberal open-door policies, including acceptance of gays, and fully expected to keep shooting until responding officers killed him.

Greg McKendry, a burly 60-year-old usher, was hailed as a hero for shielding others from gunfire. He was fatally shot along with 61-year-old Linda Kraeger, a retired English professor who had come to see a friend’s grandchild in the play.

Adkisson faced two counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted first-degree murder. Each murder charge carried a possible life sentence and each attempted-murder count up to 25 years in prison.

Adkisson had been scheduled to stand trial on March 16. His public defender, Mark Stephens, indicated last year an insanity defense was planned.

The church issued a statement last week saying the justice system was providing an “appropriate sentence” for Adkisson’s crimes.

The Unitarian Universalist church promotes progressive social work, including advocacy of women and gay rights.

Similar bills failed in 2006 and 2008.  The latest bill was filed by Sen. Paul Stanley (R) – in an effort to counter charges of gay discrimination, the measure also would apply to unmarried opposite-sex couples.

The bill “prohibits any individual who is cohabitating in a sexual relationship outside of a marriage that is valid under the constitution and laws of this state from adopting a minor.”

Same-sex couples are barred from marrying in Tennessee by a constitutional amendment passed in 2006 with 80 percent approval.

Stanley also was responsible for the 2008 attempt to bar same-sex couples from adopting.  The bill would not forbid single gays and lesbians from being adoptive parents – so long as they did not live with a partner.

In 2007, the state Attorney General’s office prepared a legal opinion saying there is nothing in the Tennessee constitution or in state law to prevent same-sex couples from becoming adoptive parents.

The opinion was sought by a county judge who was asked to approve and adoption by a same-sex couple in Wilson County.

The legal opinion said that under current state law anyone 18 years of age or older may adopt, assuming the adoption is found to be in the best interest of the child.”

“There is no prohibition in Tennessee statutes against adoption by a same sex couple,” it said. 

The opinion also noted that before a judge grants an adoption there must be a finding that the adoptive parents “are fit persons to have the care and custody of the child.”

(Memphis, Tennessee) It took a bloody jailhouse beating by police to bring Duanna Johnson out of the shadows.

With a video of the beating making the rounds on the Internet, people who would never have known she existed – and likely paid her little mind if they did – were suddenly talking about her.

Angry residents sent letters to the local newspaper and a federal grand jury launched an investigation. The mayor and police chief voiced outrage at her treatment.

But it wasn’t long before Johnson, a 43-year-old, 6-foot-5 transgender prostitute, slipped out of the spotlight and back to working the dark streets of a tough inner-city neighborhood, little noticed once again by mainstream Memphis.

And there she died with a bullet in her brain.

“She didn’t deserve to be killed, and she didn’t deserve to be beaten like they did. No matter what gender she was, she was still a human being,” said her mother, Hazel Skinner. “She was God’s child.”

The video of Johnson, who was black, being repeatedly pounded in the face by a white policeman hit Memphis TV and the Internet in June. Johnson vowed a lawsuit against the city, drawing praise from civil rights advocates and gay rights groups.

Two policemen were fired and one is awaiting trial on a civil rights charge. But pursuing a lawsuit will fall to Johnson’s family. Her fight is over.

Much of Johnson’s childhood was spent in Memphis as a boy named Duannel. The family left Tennessee when Duannel was about 12, settling primarily in Wisconsin and the Chicago area.

Johnson was shot to death near midnight Nov. 6 on a street corner a few blocks from her house. Police have no suspects or motive. Richard Janikowski, a University of Memphis criminologist, said prostitute assaults are common and difficult to solve.

Johnson returned a year-and-a-half ago to Memphis, where the annual homicide rate had already topped 100 by early November. Memphis, population 640,000, had 128 homicides in 2007, a level Janikowski said is not unusual for a city with a 26 percent poverty rate.

Johnson was living alone in a tiny, red brick house with no utilities in a low-income neighborhood dotted with boarded-up buildings and overgrown lots. Unemployed, she made her living walking the streets, flagging down motorists, offering sex for sale.

It was a hard, dangerous life. Even her mother knew little about her day-to-day affairs.

Skinner, who lives in Kenosha, Wis., said she was pressing Johnson to give up the street life that had led to a half dozen arrests in Memphis for prostitution or possession of drug paraphernalia.

As Duannel, Johnson was in and out of prison in Wisconsin from 1985 to 1992 on battery and theft convictions. As Duanna, she drew a three-year prison sentence in New York in 2000 for attempted robbery. In both states, Johnson was a habitual parole violator.

“She wanted to get her life together,” Skinner said. “I’d say, ‘Duanna, I’m praying and I want you to pray too.’ We talked about going back to school or working on computers or doing hair.”

Casey Lanham, co-founder of a transgender support group called Perpetual Transition, said Johnson, who weighed about 200 pounds and had masculine facial features, was easily identified as transgender and that made getting a job difficult.

“Duanna wouldn’t have been out there if she hadn’t been forced to be,” Lanham said. “And there are a lot of trans women who are forced to go that way.”

The Memphis support group has about 30 active members but the total number of transgender residents in the city is unknown. “It’s a very marginalized community,” Lanham said.

Johnson began living as a female in her 30s after moving to New York, undergoing hormone therapy and getting breast implants.

“But all her life she always told me, Mom, I’ve never been a boy or a man. I’ve always been a girl or a woman,” Skinner said.

Skinner said she knew little about Johnson’s private life before she moved to Memphis.

“She did office work as far as I know. That’s what she told me,” she said.

Hattie Mae Benson, an elderly neighbor, described Johnson as polite and friendly.

“We talked a lot of times, just about how the world is going and this and that,” Benson said. “She was just like any other lady to talk to.”

Benson said she was unaware that Johnson was transgender.

“I just couldn’t think about it when I heard somebody had killed her,” she said. “I just didn’t know what to think.”

Murray Wells, a lawyer hired by Johnson after the beating, said the homicide investigation has not determined if she was the victim of a hate crime.

“But because of who she was is why she was there,” he said. “If she wasn’t a transgender woman, it wouldn’t have happened.”

The suit was filed by Lambda Legal on behalf of Kenneth Giles. It names Johnson City, the Johnson City Police Department and its police chief.

“In America, the police do not get to add an extra punishment to people they don’t like,” said Greg Nevins, Supervising Senior Staff Attorney in Lambda Legal’s Southern Regional Office based in Atlanta.

“They also do not get to ignore the principle of innocent until proven guilty. The JCPD went out of its way to humiliate Mr. Giles and caused irreparable damage.”

On October 1, 2007, the JCPD issued a press release, personally approved by the police chief, that included photos that were taken at the scene where 40 men, including Giles, were arrested in a public sex sting.

The local news ran the story prominently along with the pictures and addresses of the men involved.

Lambda Legal reviewed the police department’s press releases for over a period of a year and found that out of approximately 600 other releases, none pertaining to arrests was accompanied by photos or personally approved by the chief.

Of the 40 arrested, one man has committed suicide, and several others have lost their jobs, including Kenneth Giles, who was fired from his job as a nurse at the VA hospital.

“I don’t understand how the police department can release photos of one group and not any others,” said Kenneth Giles in a statement on Wednesday.

“I lost my livelihood because my arrest was treated differently.”

Lambda Legal argues that the JCPD violated federal equal protection law by singling out these men for harsher treatment by making their images available to the media. Lambda said in a statement that the actions of the JCPD are the latest in a long history of the police going beyond legitimate law enforcement measures to take extraordinary action designed to target gay men for humiliation and harassment.

Jim D. Adkisson, 58, waived a preliminary hearing Wednesday in order to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea, said public defender Mark Stephens. Stephens said Tennessee law requires that the case get to the criminal court level before the defense receives money to pay for a mental evaluation.

“It is my burden to prove that he was insane at the time of the commission of the offense,” Stephens said outside court. “It is absolutely critical a mental health expert see him now at this critical stage.”

Prosecutors have agreed to move the case quickly to the grand jury, which is expected to return an indictment with additional charges, Stephens said.

Adkisson, 58, is currently charged with a single count of first-degree murder and remains held on $1 million bond.

Prosecutors allege that Adkisson fired three blasts with a sawed-off shotgun on July 27 at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville.

Police say Adkisson targeted the church because of its liberal leanings, citing a letter they found in his small SUV in the church parking lot and a statement he allegedly gave after the shooting.

Stephens said that in Tennessee in modern times, a “jury has never found a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity in a contested case. There have been times when defendants have been found not guilty by reason of insanity but that is usually by agreement with the prosecutors.”

“So how difficult is it? It is difficult,” he said.

Knoxville Police Chief Sterling Owen said Adkisson bought the shotgun at a pawn shop about a month before the shooting, and his letter was written about a week before the tragedy.

Adkisson carried 76 shells into the church, according to investigators. Police say he told them he expected to keep shooting until officers killed him.

Killed were 60-year-old Greg McKendry, a burly usher and church officer who was hailed as a hero for shielding others from gunfire, and 61-year-old Linda Kraeger, a retired English professor who had come to see a friend’s grandchild perform in the church play.

At least one of the wounded remained hospitalized.

The 400-member church has a long history of supporting liberal issues and causes, including racial desegregation, environmentalism, women’s rights and gay rights.

Adkisson’s former wife, Liza Alexander, was once a member of the congregation, though it was so long ago church members say they can’t remember her.

They were married almost 10 years when she obtained an order of protection against him in 2000, claiming he threatened “to blow my brains out” and she feared for her life.