hunter of justice

British appeals court: No religious exemption for employees registering civil partnerships

An England and Wales Court of Appeal decision this week held that public employees working as registrars can be required to provide services to same-sex couples regardless of the employee's religious beliefs. In Ladele v. London Borough of Islington, the court upheld the decision by the Islington registrar's office to require Lillian Ladele to register same-sex partners despite what Ladele described as her "orthodox Christian view" that marriage should be limited to male-female couples and that enabling same-sex unions was "contrary to God's instructions." The court also rejected Ladele's claim that she had been subjected to discrimination based on religion.

Moreover, the court found that the British anti-discrimination law prohibiting different treatment in public services based on sexual orientation required the Borough to act as it did:

[H]owever much sympathy one may have with someone such as Ms. Ladele..., the legislature has decided that the requirements of a modern liberal democracy ...include outlawing discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on ground of sexual orientation, subject only to very limited exceptions. 

The court noted that the anti-discrimination law exempts "organizations the purpose of which is the practice or advancement or the like of religion or belief."

At the end of its decision, the court states that borough governments can elect not to designate persons who have religious objections as "civil partnership registrars." I am not familiar with how such offices function in the UK, but this appears to reflect the principle that employers may accommodate religious objections to performance of certain aspects of a job if it is feasible to do so. 

I am in basic agreement with this decision. In my view, public employees have a duty to serve the public, not merely a portion of the public. However, if offices can be organized so that religious objectors can be transferred or otherwise assigned to jobs that do not involve issuing licenses to the public, that seems a pragmatic and reasonable result.

The case is subject to one more level of appeal.

Uganda analysis: American religious conservatives and the global trade in culture wars

Pressure is building on Uganda's government to abandon or revise extremist anti-gay legislation that would imprison or, in some situations, execute persons for homosexuality. American political and religious leaders have condemned the bill, joined by other governments and the Vatican. (Photo below is from protest in London.) In the process, the role of conservative American churches in promoting anti-gay policies through various Christian churches in Africa has come to light. The same issue, in less extreme form, is being debated in Rwanda and may surface in Egypt.

 The best analysis that I have read is by Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia. Rev. Kaoma's article (based on a recently published study) goes beyond dissing Rick Warren or describing how a March 2009 Family Life Network conference in Kampala, featuring right-wing evangelist Scott Lively, provided the trigger for the new bill. The story is more complex than the image of bigoted white guys yahooing it up in Africa. The heart of it is a mutually beneficial reciprocity of dollars from First World churches going to economically desperate populations and Third World moral authority being exported as a weapon to use against First World religious progressives.

Following are excerpts from his article in Public Eye:

...If they had faced strong opposition, U.S. conservatives might not have been so successful in promoting their homophobic politics. Traditionally, evangelical African churches have been biblically and doctrinally orthodox but socially progressive on such issues as national liberation and poverty, making them natural partners of the politically liberal western churches. But their religious orthodoxy also provides the U.S. Right with an opportunity. Africans resonate with the denunciation of homosexuality as a postcolonial plot; their homophobia is as much an expression of resistance to the West as it is a statement about human sexuality. Similarly campaigns for "family values" in Africa rest on rich indigenous notions of the importance of family and procreation. In Africa, "family" expresses the idea that to be human is to be embedded in community, a concept called "ubuntu." African traditional values also value procreation, making those hindering this virtue an enemy of life.

Although Rick Warren's involvement in Africa is the most celebrated, and Lively's perhaps the most notorious, they are not the first U.S. conservative evangelicals to influence African policies. Pat Robertson's television show The 700 Club is watched across sub-Saharan Africa. Yet most Africans are not aware that Robertson supported the civil war in Angola and the oppressive White governments of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. He was one of many U.S. conservative evangelicals, some of whom came to Africa as missionaries in the 1980s, who sided with those White minority governments in their effort to stop the spread of liberation theology. Allied with them was – and is – the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a U.S. neoconservative group that also supported the White regimes and challenged the National Council of Churches as a group of dangerous Marxists supporting subversion. The group formed in 1981 with the goal of weakening and splitting U.S. mainline denominations in order to block their powerful progressive social witness promoting social and economic justice....

The torrential flow of conservative Christian resources to Africa helps wash away the memory of their alliances with White regimes. Through their extensive communication networks in Africa, social welfare projects, Bible schools, and educational materials, U.S. religious conservatives warn of the dangers of homosexuals and present themselves as the true representatives of U.S. evangelicalism, effectively marginalizing mainline U.S. churches that once had strong relationships on the continent. Right-wing groups have enticed African religious leaders to reject funding from mainline denominations – which require documentation of how the money is spent – and instead to accept funds from conservatives, further empowering the U.S. evangelical viewpoint while giving local bishops the opportunity to line their pockets.

To reach Africans, U.S. evangelicals now broadcast their Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Although generally disinterested in helping poor Blacks in their own backyard, in Africa U.S. White conservatives driven to convert the continent dominate social services, run orphanages, schools and universities, and provide loans. These conservatives and evangelical charities like World Vision, Solar Light for Africa, and the IRD-founded Five Talents use their presence in Africa to address the question of homosexuality from a conservative albeit misleading position. In this way, almost all U.S. conservative Christians working in Africa are responsible for exporting homophobia to Africa.

Indeed, Africans do not distinguish between moderate evangelicals in World Vision and Hard Right figures like Scott Lively. For them, the term "evangelical" conveys the notion of Protestant Christianity as a whole, without the substantive distinctions made by U.S. religious groups. And U.S. conservative evangelicals support diverse Anglican, Presbyterian and Pentecostal church leadership in Africa with which they share no denominational tie. For instance, the Providence Christian Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan is not an Episcopal congregation yet it provides funding to the Anglican Church of Uganda. Some U.S. support goes directly to salaries, and has since 1998 ....

While U.S. evangelicals are actively disseminating their antigay views through their mission work, American mainline renewal movements reach out to African churches for support in fights against gay ordination and marriage, helping to further crystallize this as an African issue. At their behest, Anglican churches in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria rejected funding from The Episcopal Church USA in 2004 over disagreements about gay ordination and other culture war issues. While these attacks have resulted in schisms within the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church USA and continue to threaten the unity of the United Methodist Church, they offer African churches financial and ideological benefits, including a voice in international circles. As Kenya's Rosemary Mbongo told me, "Africans, Asians, and Latin American evangelical Christians have the voice today; they owe it to American conservatives."

Continues after the jump -->

Seeking asylum from the U.S. military

A young lesbian who enlisted to serve in the U.S. Army and then fled after prolonged physical and verbal abuse has won reinstatement of her application for asylum in Canada. A Canadian appellate court ruled that the Canadian Refugee Board had failed to give sufficient weight to the arguments made by Private Bethany Smith that, because of her lesbianism, she could not receive a fair trial within the American military.  The court noted that 10 years ago, another gay soldier - Barry Winchell - was murdered at the same base where Private Smith had been stationed (Fort Campbell, KY), in what apparently was a hate crime.

From Women's e/news, with a HT to Marcy Karin:

For months, Pvt. Bethany Smith silently endured taunts and physical abuse from her fellow soldiers at Fort Campbell, Ky., for being a lesbian. But when she received an anonymous note one day with a threat against her life, Smith decided she had to get out of the Army.

"It said that they were going to break into the supply room and get the keys to my room and beat me to death in my bed," Smith said, adding that the letter came only a couple months after she learned the Army was deploying her to Afghanistan. "It was at that point that I knew I was more afraid of the people who were supposed to be on my side than people we were supposed to be fighting overseas."

More than 12,000 service members have lost their jobs because of the U.S. military's so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy. A disproportionate number of those discharges are women, according to 2008 statistics gathered by the Washington-based Servicemembers Legal Defense Network from the government under the Freedom of Information Act.

With the help of an acquaintance, Smith abandoned Fort Campbell and drove for two straight days to Canada, where she hoped to seek asylum. She crossed the border on Sept. 11, 2007. More than two years later, Smith, now 21, is fighting to stay in Ottawa, where she works for a call center.

Her efforts to obtain refugee status were boosted in November when a Canadian federal court judge decided her case should be reconsidered by the country's refugee board, which had earlier rejected her claim....

Smith assumes she would face a court martial for desertion in the United States and possibly further charges for having same-sex relations. She also believes that a court martial would consist of her peers, who would likely share the same views about her sexual orientation as her tormentors.

Jamie Liew, her lawyer, says Smith's father has received a visit from police with an arrest warrant related to her flight from the Army. Court documents also state Smith received a text message from a soldier from her base threatening that she deserved to be killed for deserting the unit.

Smith's case, believed to be a first, is based on anti-homosexual persecution within the U.S. military, says Liew, rather than on a reluctance to serve overseas, as has been the case for a multitude of other U.S. soldiers who have fled to Canada to avoid serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The idea that she would be deployed with people who were giving her death threats is a problem," Liew said. "If people in your unit are not there to have your back, you would be killed in a war and you wouldn't even know if it was because of friendly fire, of enemy fire or because of someone deliberately firing at you . . . Her situation is unique in that way."...

Human rights, sexuality and gender in the Middle East

I'm a big fan of Scott Long, the lgbt rights division director at Human Rights Watch. Following is an excerpt of an interview he did with Rex Wockner. This portion focuses on the Middle East; the full interview is here.

The stuff we saw in Iraq, the killing campaign this year, is a very extreme version of what we’ve seen in other places in the Middle East, which is, you suddenly get basically a moral panic around the issue of homosexuality where a lot of other social anxieties about, you know, westernization, social change, change in gender roles, masculinity, they all get wrapped up into one issue and somebody’s scapegoated, someone is targeted. The Queen Boat arrests in Egypt were very much like that, in that all of these fears about rock music and Satanism and heavy metal and effeminate men and long hair suddenly got transmuted into the issue of homosexuality. And we’ve seen kind of smaller eruptions like that in places from Morocco to Turkey over the last few years. It is very complex because it is connected to the reality of very swift social change that people find unsettling, in many cases terrifying. It’s connected to the reality of westernization and of very swift and unsettling economic changes as well. I mean, the anxieties behind it are real.

The scapegoat is fictional, but the people who suffer are also real, and I think, you know, what we need across the Middle East is not just LGBT movements who are capable of responding to this—that will take a long time—but we need a stronger commitment from mainstream human rights organizations to fight moral panics and to stand up for the human rights even of the most marginalized, stigmatized people in the community....

In both Iraq and Uganda, I think the fears and the violence of the response—the kind of legal violence that’s being proposed in Uganda and the really literal violence in Iraq—are certainly enabled by a long history of violence and social collapse. You know, Uganda has gone through 25 or 30 years of civil war. You can stand in Kampala and it looks like a beautiful, placid, just lovely place, and then you remember what’s happened to many of the people walking by you on the street in the last two decades, and you remember the civil war that’s still raging in the north, and you realize how much fear there is underneath the surface. And I think the Museveni government has been actually very clever at focusing all of people’s anxieties on homosexuality as kind of the universal target and the universal scapegoat.

In Iraq, it’s quite true that homosexuals were never particularly targeted under the Saddam regime. He had other enemies. But to the other enemies, he was absolutely brutal. ... The sanctions, and then the just-total U.S.-induced collapse of security after the invasion, have created an environment where everybody lives in anticipation of violence and where everybody feels that being ready to be violent yourself is the only safeguard. And the militias, the Mahdi Army, are the product of that—they’re a bunch of young men who see no future for themselves and whose only social role that they can imagine for themselves if they don’t have jobs, they don’t have stable family structures, they don’t have stable lives, the only role they can imagine for themselves is enforcing some imaginary version of morality. So I think the circumstances are somewhat special, but, you know, these very deep-rooted fears about sexuality, sexual difference, gender—I really think the issue of, you know, what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman are at the core of much of this homophobic violence as much as people’s kind of fantasies about what other folks are doing in bed.

These fears are not just limited to Iraq and Uganda; you see them everywhere. I mean, the trans folks who get beaten up on the streets of New York are facing the same kinds of fears in a different version. It’s just that you have certain social situations which allow them complete sway....

German registered partners entitled to same pension rights as spouses

Germany's constitutional court (the equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court) ruled late last week that surviving partners in a registered civil partnership have a right to collect under the occupational pension scheme for civil service employees. The court found that affording such payments to surviving spouses in a marriage but excluding civil partners violated the equal treatment provision in Article 3.1 of Germany's Basic Law (the rough equivalent of the Constitution), and was not  justified by the rationale underlying the pension system. The complaint was brought by a civil servant in a registered partnership after being denied the same premium rates as married persons - a classification that also would deny his partner the right to collect on the pension in the event of his death. 

Coincidentally, the Williams Institute has just published an analysis of the discrepancies between same-sex partners and married couples in their access to employer-sponsored retirement benefits in the U.S.

An English language version of the German court's summary of the new decision is after the jump -->

European Commission warns of lgbt rights deficiencies in nations seeking EU admission

The European Commission has published its 2009 "Progress Reports" on the countries now or potentially seeking EU membership: Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo.

According to ILGA-Europe:

LGBT issues are covered in all reports and stronger language is used by the Commission when referring to the human rights violations of LGBT people and to the non-compliance of the states to their human rights obligations under European/Accession partnerships. It is also positive to notice that the reports give specific recommendations to the states to introduce anti-discrimination laws and policies that are in line with the EU requirements. The Reports also emphasise the need to level up ‘the protection against discrimination in practice’ in the countries where the laws were adopted (Croatia, Serbia). In particular, the Commission has criticised the governments for failing to provide adequate protection to Belgrade Pride participants which led to cancellation of the event, and for the violation of freedom of expression and association in the infamous case of Lambda Istanbul in Turkey.

ILGA-Europe's compilation of specific references to lgbt issues follows the jump -->

Uruguay passes landmark gender identity law

By guest blogger Harper Jean Tobin - cross-posted to T-Equality Blog

Uruguay’s legislature Monday finalized legislation that will guarantee transgender people’s right to legal recognition of their gender identity based on the reality of their life in society as a man or woman. The legislation, based on similar laws adopted in the United Kingdom in 2004 and in Spain in 2007, is the most progressive of any Latin American nation. Following final approval by the Uruguayan House and Senate, the bill now goes to President Tabaré Vázquez for his signature.

The legislation begins with the statement that “Everyone has the right to free development of his personality according to his own gender identity, regardless of their gender is biological, genetic, anatomical, morphological, hormonal, or other assignment.” An individual will have the right to change his or her sex in the civil registry based upon the “stability and persistence” of gender dysphoria for at least two years. The bill calls for an interdisciplinary expert team, similar to the UK Gender Recognition Panel, to be set up by the government to evaluate applications for civil sex change. Once the civil register has been amended, an applicant is considered to be his or her new gender for all legal and administrative purposes. (A full English translation is not yet available; this description is based on the Spanish version on the Parliament's website.)

In addition to an applicant’s own testimony, the team may consider the testimony of the individual’s health care providers and “people who know the daily lifestyle of the applicant.” However, the law does not require medical evidence be submitted, and “under no circumstances” is proof of surgery to be required. This is similar to the UK law. By contrast, Spain requires proof of some form of medical treatment for a two-year period, except in cases of old age or illness.

Unlike laws in several other countries, Uruguay’s legislation does not require that applicants be childless or unmarried, or that married applicants divorce. The law states only that it does not change existing laws regarding marriage – a concession to conservatives who wanted it made clear that this law does not establish same-sex marriage. Another unusual provision requires a five-year wait in the rare case of an individual wishing to return his or her civil sex to the birth sex.

This is not the first groundbreaking stride in LGBT rights for the South American nation, which lies just south of Brazil. President Vázquez’s Broad Front coalition made Latin American history in 2007 by passing civil union legislation. Earlier this year, legislation guaranteed same-sex couples the right to adopt. The senator who introduced the civil union law has promised that if the Broad Front prevails in national elections later this month, legislation establishing marriage equality will be introduced next year.

Scrutinizing trans bodies in Western Australia

by guest blogger Harper Jean Tobin

The Attorney General of the state of Western Australia is currently asking the supreme court of that state to revoke gender recognition certificates issued to two transgender men there. The two men both prevailed before a state administrative tribunal, which ruled last month that they had met all the criteria required by state law to obtain legal recognition of their gender transition. The Attorney General, however, argues that the state law cannot be interpreted to allow any person to legally change their gender if there remains any possibility of future fertility.

The two men brought unrelated petitions under the state’s Gender Reassignment Act, which allows transgender people to obtain a “gender recognition certificate,” and in turn (if they were born in that jurisdiction) an amended birth certificate. The petitioners, like others bringing petitions under the GRA and related legislation in other jurisdictions, need legal and administrative recognition of their transition order to work, travel, find housing, conduct financial transactions,  obtain public services, and otherwise carry on their day-to-day lives. In this case, both petitioners had received treatment under medical supervision over a number of years, including hormone therapy and surgical procedures. Both testified that they might ideally have wished to have additional surgical procedures, they did not plan to do so because of concerns including costs, medical risks, and limitations of current surgical techniques. Nevertheless, the conservative Attorney General intervened in the case, arguing that the men could not be legally recognized as men because it was not clear they were permanently sterile.

In the resulting hearing, both men were subjected to extensive medical testimony, in which several experts were pressed as to whether there existed some remote possibility that either of these men could become pregnant. When the experts testified that this was all but impossible given the men’s ongoing hormone treatment, they were asked repeatedly to speculate on whether a future cessation of hormone use – however unlikely that might be – could eventually result in regained fertility. Ultimately, however, the tribunal concluded that an individual’s right to social recognition of their gender should not depend upon such considerations, and granted the men’s applications.

The state attorney general immediately appealed. Explaining the decision to appeal, the AG said: “What this decision has said is that a person can be legally male and yet potentially bear children. This is a major decision which, if allowed to stand, could have significant and unforeseen effects on the laws of this State.” Tellingly, AG did not state what those “significant and unforeseen effects” might be, nor did he cite examples from other jurisdictions where present law is clearly consistent with the tribunals decision, such as Spain and the United Kingdom. Given the almost totally gender-neutral laws surrounding parentage and inheritance today, it is difficult to imagine what “significant and unforeseen effects on the laws” of Western Australia might be. Indeed, one strongly suspects that the AG is more concerned with perceived social effects of permitting individuals such control over their bodies and social identities than with any tangible legal effect.

                Aside from failing to articulate any actual reason for his legal position, the Western Australia attorney general’s position betrays an unseemly governmental interest in the private lives and reproductive choices of individuals. Assuming for the sake of discussion that society has some interest in ensuring that a gender transition is reasonably permanent before bestowing official recognition, it certainly has no such interest in preventing transgender individuals, or any individuals, from reproducing. While Australia has often been criticized for the absence of a right to privacy in its federal constitution, a legal requirement that a certain group of individuals be sterilized in order to obtain critical social benefits would seemingly violate that country’s international obligations under human rights treaties. While the two men in this case may not desire to make use of their own reproductive capacity, they clearly should not be required to undergo major surgery for the sole purpose of obliterating any such capacity.

                These bodily integrity and reproductive autonomy dimensions of gender recognition have seldom been recognized by courts. But the attorney general’s appeal in this case seems to present those questions squarely to the Western Australia Supreme Court. Hopefully the state’s high court will rise to the task.

Update from New Delhi - Government ducks questions of appeal of sodomy law ruling

The Indian national government announced that it would take no position on the correctness of an appellate court decision declaring the sodomy law unconstitutional, but instead would defer to the Supreme Court's assessment. A memorandum prepared for the Cabinet had recommended that the government not ask the highest court to review the decision. It seems from the report below that there is some confusion about exactly what the Cabinet's decision means, beyond please-make-this-go-away.

From The Economic Times:

The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, considered the report of the three-member Group of Ministers formed on the issue and decided that Attorney General G Vahanvati will "assist" the Supreme Court on it. "The Cabinet decided to ask the Attorney General to assist the Supreme Court in every way desired by it in arriving at an opinion on the correctness of the judgement of the High Court," Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told reporters.

To a volley of questions, she repeated the same formulation of her statement and said the Supreme Court can decide if the High Court was "right or not" in decriminalising gay sex. She refused to say anything more on the issue, maintaining that she was not authorised to "explain" further as the matter related to Cabinet proceedings.

The Cabinet decided against taking any stand on the issue to avoid getting caught in any controversy, a minister said, explaining why it was left for the Apex court to take a view.

Another first for Latin America: gay adoption in Uruguay

Uruguay lawmakers Wednesday adopted a trailblazing law allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children, in an unprecedented move for Latin America. ... [T]he contentious bill passed its final hurdle with 17 out of 23 senators voting in favor of the legislation.

It was approved by lawmakers from the ruling leftwing Frente Amplio and the opposition Colorado Party, while the opposition National Party voted against. The Senate had already approved a draft bill on its first reading in July, but it had to pass a second vote due to slight changes to the text introduced when the lower house voted approved the legislation last month.

Gay adoptions remain contentious worldwide, and Uruguay, a nation of some 3.5 million people, is taking another step away from its more conservative neighbors after having already authorized gay civil unions last year. President Tabare Vazquez, the first leftist leader in Uruguayan history, already opened access for homosexuals to military schools in May. But the move faced huge opposition from the country's religious leaders and some right-wing politicians.

The Catholic Church is against the bill because "from Genesis in the Bible, it says that 'God created man and woman,'" Bishop Paul Galimbertti said. "The position of the Church is very clear on this issue," he said, adding "there is no proof that adoption by homosexuals is a positive thing."...

"Uruguay has a long tradition of leading the way in civil rights, and has shown a desire to move ahead quickly on such questions," said social sciences professor Adolfo Garce at the Montevideo University. The large wave of European immigration to the country in the 20th century, particularly from Spain has given it "a progressive and secular culture," he added.

Uruguay was the first country in the largely Catholic South American region to approve divorce in 1907, and gave women the right to vote in 1932. But abortion remains illegal, after President Vazquez vetoed a proposed bill last year which would have legalized the terminations of pregnancies on "ethical grounds."

+++

Source: yahoo news; HT Oscar Cabrera

Indian government unlikely to appeal decision invalidating the sodomy law

Indian government documents made public yesterday indicate that an appeal of Naz Foundation v. Government of Delhi is highly unlikely. In Naz, the High Court of Delhi ruled that the country's sodomy law, a holdover from British colonial rule, violated the national constitution. A joint document from three ministries recommends that the government not challenge the ruling. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will make the final decision whether to direct that an appeal be filed. From the Hindustan Times:

The three ministries had been directed by the Prime Minister to firm up the government stand, following the opposing stands taken by the Home and Health ministries before the high court last year. The  [memorandum], likely to be put up before the Union Cabinet on Thursday, was prepared after meetings between the Home, Health and law Ministries. It states there appeared to be no “legal error in the judgment, which has not struck down the entire Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)”, given by the high court on July 2.

The [recommendation was] prepared on the basis of the opinion given by union Law Secretary TK Vishwanathan. “Since the court has not struck down the entire section, and has confined itself to consensual acts in private, it will be difficult for the government to question the HC judgment,” the Law Secretary stated.

Will new constitution in Zimbabwe decriminalize homosexual conduct?

Led by the fiercely anti-gay Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe has long been a nightmare for lgbt people.  Male homosexual sexual conduct is illegal there, a status reaffirmed by the nation's highest court in a prosecution of one of Mugabe's predecessors, Canaan Banana [S. v. Banana, 2000(3)SA 885 (ZS)].

This summer, however, meetings have been ongoing to draft a new constitution. Anti-democracy thugs disrupted the conference last month, but it then resumed. Given that Mugabe is still in power, it may be unrealistic to expect that the drafting project will lead to anything more than words on paper. If the process does continue to completion, though, there will be a referendum on the new constitution next year.

AIDS and lgbt activists have been seeking to invoke the kinds of protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation found in the South African constitution to achieve greater legal protection in Zimbabwe.

According to this dispatch from the Guardian, they plan to use the argument that criminal laws impede efforts to fight AIDS, an urgent issue there and throughout Africa, and the subject of a keynote speech at last year's International AIDS Conference:

Gay men and lesbians in Zimbabwe are hoping for an end to years of "hysterical homophobia" by having their rights enshrined in the new constitution.

Sexual acts between men are outlawed in the socially conservative country (there is no legal reference to women) and the president, Robert Mugabe, has encouraged a climate of hostility by condemning homosexuality, describing it as a western import.

His opponents in the Movement for Democratic Change are more supportive of gay rights, raising hopes that Zimbabwe's constitution could follow that of South Africa, the first in the world to specifically outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual preference.

Keith Goddard said the group Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) – of which he is director – had tried twice to get sexual orientation included in the constitution.

"Now, with the new constitutional review, we are pushing again for sexual orientation," he said. "The National Aids Council has moved forward enormously from its original policy, and in its strategic plan for 2006-10 it specifically calls for the decriminalisation of homosexuality because punitive measures have simply driven the community underground and make this hidden population difficult to reach.

"So I think we can use it on the grounds of health and HIV/Aids interventions to try and argue the issue. Arguing it on religious or moral grounds is not going to get it anywhere. We live in hope. I think we've probably got a 50:50 chance."

Human Rights Watch documents "a killing campaign" targeting gay men in Iraq

Human Rights Watch issued a gruesome report yesterday documenting a campaign of murder and torture directed against hundreds of gay men, or men perceived as gay, in Iraq. A few excerpts from this powerful document - "They Want Us Exterminated" - paint the basic picture:

A killing campaign moved across Iraq in the early months of 2009.  While the country remains a dangerous place for many if not most of its citizens, death squads started specifically singling out men whom they considered not "manly" enough, or whom they suspected of homosexual conduct.  The most trivial details of appearance - the length of a man's hair, the fit of his clothes - could determine whether he lived or died.

...[M]en have been targeted, threatened or tortured [primarily in Baghdad, but also] in Kirkuk, Najaf, Basra. Murders are committed with impunity, admonitory in intent, with corpses dumped in garbage or hung as warnings on the street. ...

...Panic that some people have turned decadent or "soft" amid social change and foreign occupation seems to motivate much of the violence...

According to the HRW report, militia groups such as the Mahdi Army are behind the attacks. Official response has mostly been to ignore the murders; there are some reports of police complicity. The report states that the Mahdi Army is exploiting concerns about morality to try to rebuild its popularity, "by targeting people few in Iraq would venture to defend."

The authorities in control of Iraq - the Iraqi and American governments - should treat this situation for what it is: a form of ethnic cleansing based on sexuality and gender nonconformity.

Scott Long and the others at HRW who produced this report deserve enormous thanks.  

Argentina's AG files brief in gay marriage case before Supreme Court

From Blabbeando:

Argentina's Attorney General, Esteban Righi, has filed a lengthy brief with the country's Supreme Court in which he argues that government should not ignore the realities of gay life, and asks Justices to call upon the legislative branch to "clarify" ways in which same-sex couples can attain the same rights as married heterosexual partners.

The brief was filed in response to a pending court case challenging the constitutionality of Argentina's marriage laws on the basis that they discriminate against same-sex couples.

From Página/12:

In February 2007, María Rachid and Claudia Castro wanted to marry just as any heterosexual couple might, but the same civil court who had granted them a civil union years before, had to refuse. "I would love to but I can't. The law doesn't allow me", she explained, so the women turned the frustrated [attempt at] marriage into a claim of unconstitutionality against that law, considering it discriminatory. In mid-2007, Judge María Bacigalupo found that the denial had been most correct, which prompted another judicial claim by Rachid and Castro, this time before the Court of Appeals, which also rejected the claim. In this way, it reached the Supreme Court. Righi's statement is a response to this claim.

Happy July 14

Viva la liberte!

And my personal dedication: to the people of Palestine