Politics

Having a 20,000-acre spread, one of the largest farms in one of the nation’s most productive farm states, buys some clout.

His words were perhaps revelatory on the subject of inclusion—by God and by fellow humans—of all people, regardless of race, socio-economic status, religion, and even sexual orientation.

The fallout from one Indiana resident’s newly publicized relationship with the beleaguered politico has reached a bizarre level.

Facebook users who disagreed with Pence’s position on same-sex marriage angrily assailed him with their own original posts via that social-media channel.

In her records, she found a single manila folder containing a dozen unopened letters, postmarked nearly 40 years earlier, that she had long forgotten. … “Women of my generation were told to go to college and get your ‘MRS’ degree. It’s hard [for young people] to understand how radical it was to think a woman could be a doctor, a lawyer, or a legislator.'”

Best known as one of Indy’s top florists, he helped bring the city’s LGBT festival out of the closet.

Previously both a fiscal and social conservative, Donnelly now expresses the belief that supporting same-sex marriage is “the right thing to do.”

Inside Crooked Creek Elementary School’s cafeteria, Glenda Ritz wielded a scalpel, in-structing about 100 fourth-graders in the art of dissecting a spiny dogfish shark. The smell of the dead specimens, spread out on metal trays on top of blue table covers, filled the air. It was a lesson she had delivered—and a procedure she’d performed—more than a dozen times throughout her 33-year teaching career.

With all the noise surrounding new Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz, will her agenda of slowing down reforms advance? Or is her voice—and those of her supporters—bound to get drowned out?

An unlikely but passionate rift has heated up in a Southern Indiana school district over the concept of prom events for opposite- and same-gender student pairs. First, Diana Medley, a special education teacher in the Northeast School Corporation in Sullivan County, made remarks to a WTWO-TV (Terre Haute) reporter that set the Internet and regional and even national media atwitter. Outside of a planning meeting for a strictly opposite-sex-dating prom in the school district, she said, in response to the interviewer’s question about whether she thinks gay people have “some purpose in life”: “I don’t. I personally don’t, I’m sorry. I don’t understand it.” In the same TV news report, Bill Phegley, a pastor at Carlisle Christian Church, makes statements considered incendiary by some and to be treasured by others, saying Christians are always “prepared for a fight” and that Jesus gives them “armor for the front, not the back” so as not to run away from that fight.

Florida likes the way Tony Bennett, Indiana’s uprooted Superintendent of Public Instruction, thinks: teacher evaluations based on student performance, schools receiving grades on the same scale used for their charges, and the headline-grabbing push for more charter education and voucher programs. The Sunshine State apparently longed for his leadership and initiative, offering him the reins to clean up its education system in the midst of his term as the Hoosier State’s public schools czar. The Floridian version of the role boasted a salary that tripled his own in Indiana.

Editor’s Note: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels rides into the sunset this month, trading his gubernatorial duties for presidential powers (to a degree) as Purdue University’s leader. Here, Evan West’s June 2005 conversation with the biker-in-chief. Here in Indiana, we like things that go fast. I’m no different. The first motorcycle I ever rode belonged to […]

To understand the chasm currently separating Indiana’s political parties, all you need to do is picture their election-night celebrations. On November 6, the Democrats chose a sedate ballroom at the Downtown Marriott. The Republicans, who were marching toward supermajorities in the House and the Senate, chose the end zone at Lucas Oil Stadium.

Midway through his first term as mayor, Lugar joined Dolly Parton onstage at a concert in Garfield Park—and received an impromptu smooch on the cheek. “She said, ‘Mr. Mayor, I want you to come on down to Nashville and be our mayor,’” recalls Morris. “He blushed, thanked her, and walked off the stage.”