NewsWrap for the week ending February 1st, 1997 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #462, distributed 02-03-97) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Ron Buckmire, Graham Underhill, Goncarlo Diniz, Bjorn Skolander, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon, and anchored by Brian Nunes and Cindy Friedman.] The SWAPO Party liberated Namibia, but it's not willing to extend that same freedom to gays and lesbians there. In an unprecedented statement, the majority party's Secretary for Information and Publicity Alpheus Naruseb expressed solidarity with recent gay-bashing statements by Namibia's President Sam Nujoma. Naruseb claimed that the "immoral foreign values" of Europeans, which he also called "gayism", were destroying Namibian culture. Naruseb described gays and lesbians as "perverts", their sex acts as "vile" and "alien practices", and their protests of Nujoma's earlier remarks as "belittling the moral standards of the Namibian nation." Naruseb said, "Homosexuality deserves severe contempt and disdain from the Namibian people and should be uprooted totally as a practice." South Africa's National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality responded that homosexuality is not in fact foreign to Africa, and cited both the Namibian Constitution and the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination in concluding that, "It is discrimination that is un-African, and not homosexuality." Iceland's Parliament has moved to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination and defamation. A bill proposed by the Minister of Justice establishes criminal penalties for denying services or goods based on sexual orientation, and for "every action that humiliates, degrades, slanders, (or) defames" an individual or group because of sexual orientation. Portugal has amended its penal code to equalize the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual acts. Although elsewhere this has usually meant lowering the age of consent for gays and lesbians, Portugal instead increased the age of consent for heterosexual acts from 14 to 16. Portugese activists are concerned, however, that there is still a separate statute for homosexual acts between adults and youth ages 14 through 16, which they believe could lead to discriminatory sentencing, even though the parallel law for heterosexuals is identical in all respects. For the first time, France has granted political asylum to a foreign national for persecution based on sexual orientation. The refugee is a gay man from Algeria known only as "L. Faysal." According to the Gay and Lesbian Center of Paris, Faysal is an activist who had founded two organizations in Algeria, one to work for civil rights and one to prevent AIDS. Faysal paid a high price for his visibility in Algeria with frequent attacks and arrests by police, and pursuit and death threats by homophobic Muslims. It was the advocacy of AIDS and human rights groups in France which convinced the National Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons to grant Faysal refugee status. In a "first" for Australia, the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Tribunal ruled this week that a clinic had illegally discriminated against a lesbian when it denied her artificial insemination services. The lesbian known as "JM" was awarded 7,500 Australian dollars from a clinic in Brisbane. She had discovered that no clinic in the state was willing to provide fertility services to lesbians, but the Brisbane doctor had offered to help if she lied on her consent form by filling in the name of a male partner. The British government is promoting a plan to extend a military youth program into every school in the country, but like the adult armed services it would reject known gays and lesbians, both as participants and as adult leaders. Prime Minister John Major and Defense Secretary Michael Portillo claim the cadets programs will not only improve military recruiting, but will also instil discipline and patriotism, decrease crime by providing structured activities and role models, teach leadership and teamwork, and improve physical fitness and self-esteem. While the gay and lesbian military activist group Rank Outsiders is protesting this second-class treatment of sexual minority youth, two teachers associations are determined to stop the Defense Ministry from interfering in the running of schools and discriminating based on sexual orientation. Gun control advocates are also protesting the cadets expansion. The Inspector General of the U.S. Air Force claims that an investigation has revealed no evidence of a "witch hunt" for gays and lesbians at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu. The gay and lesbian advocacy group SLDN, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, had demanded the inquiry based on its own information regarding the discharges of four men who had been identified as part of another man's plea bargain agreement. An officer has also appealed criminal charges brought against him after being named by the same man. At a previous press conference, SLDN's co-executive director Dixon Osburn said, "Charles Moskos, one of the principal architects of the military's current policy, agrees that this was a violation of the policy that he helped create ... The Air Force has been stonewalling for months on the Hickam investigation. It does not take a rocket scientist to look at the relevent documents in the case in order to conclude that the Air Force broke its own rules here. It does, however, appear to be requiring a good deal of clever legal maneuvering to explain away the military's violations." The city of San Francisco is hanging tough in defense of its pioneering new law requiring contractors to extend equal spousal benefits to the domestic partners of their gay and lesbian employees. The first serious conflict arose in connection with United Airlines, the major user of San Francisco's airport. Although United had already begun consideration of domestic partners benefits, it has not responded favorably to being pressured by the city into extending them not only to its thousands of local employees but also to all of its more than 80,000 employees worldwide. That negotiation is still underway. The second serious conflict is with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, William Levada, who began protesting soon after the measure's passage that it would violate the "religious and ethical tenets" of church-related groups to force them to acknowledge gay and lesbian partnerships. Levada was referring to about 5-1/2-million-dollars' worth of contracts with the city by the non-profit social service Catholic Charities, and seems to be heading for a lawsuit. San Francisco's Mayor and Board of Supervisors were completely unimpressed, pointing out that Catholic Charities was not and could not be contracting with the city as a religious organization, and couldn't have it both ways. It made it a particularly awkward moment for openly lesbian San Francisco Supervisor Leslie Katz, who had been part of a steering committee assisting in Catholic Charities' development of a new residence for people with AIDS. She and many other steering committee members resigned in protest, leading the charity to delay a special event relating to the residence. In a San Francisco twist, Catholic Charities' own spokesperson in connection with the residence, as well as more than one resigning steering committee member, is openly gay. A Roman Catholic archbishop in Germany may face charges of slander and defamation for declaring gays unfit to serve the Church. Johannes Dyba, Archbishop of Trier, said in his encyclical for the month of January that only men who have "the right stuff to be good, healthy family men" should enter holy orders. In response, one gay Catholic complained to the public prosecutor's office, which is currently investigating. TV reporters were told by some priests that 20 to 25 percent of Catholic clergy are gay, making them crucial to the pastoral work of the Church. The Archbishop seemed to pull back from his hard line, however, when his spokesperson said that homosexual feelings -- as opposed to activities -- should not be a source of shame or guilt. Of course, all Catholic priests are expected to carry out their vows of celibacy. And finally ... a commercial featuring a male-to-female transsexual aired on U.S. television during the Super Bowl football championship, where ad time costs two million dollars per minute. The ad was intended to grab some attention for a full-blown campaign to begin in March, promoting Holiday Inn Worldwide's one-billion-dollar investment in renovations. Although the tranny ad was never really meant for continuing airplay, the hotel chain announced this week that it would never be broadcast again, after receiving complaints from both trans-phobes and trannys who found it offensive. Actually, the ad had received "overwhelmingly positive" response in pre-broadcast consumer tests, and the fifty-odd phone calls received at the time of the broadcast reportedly ran about two-to-one in support. The ad features a glamorous blonde woman entering her class reunion to many admiring glances, while narration gave an accounting of the cost of her "remodelled" nose, lips and breasts. One former classmate struggles to remember her name and shudders to finally realize that it was Bob Johnson. The narrator comments, "It's amazing the changes you can make for a few thousand dollars." ------------*-------------- Sources for this week's report included: The Associated Press; The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio News; BBC Radio 5 Live's "Out This Week"; The Electronic Telegraph (London); The Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia); The London Times; Maui News (Hawaii); The Namibian; Reuter News Service; The San Francisco Examiner; EuroQueer Digest; and cyberpress releases from ILGA (International Lesbian & Gay Association); PR Newswire; GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation/U.S.); ILGA-Portugal; National Coalition for Gay & Lesbian Equality (South Africa); Samtoekin 78 (Iceland); and SLDN (Servicemembers Legal Defense Network/U.S.).