Subject: 03/31/97 (#470) NewsWrap [10:45 as recorded]

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 19:38:05 -0500 (EST)

NewsWrap
               for the week ending March 29th, 1997
         (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #470, 
                          distributed 03-31-97)
[Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Graham
Underhill, Martin Rice, Tom Ramsey, Bjorn Skolander, Gary Wu, Michael
Schembri, Jane Palmer, Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon, and anchored by Cindy
Friedman and Brian Nunes.]

  In an astonishing turnaround in Australia, the Liberal Party government of
Tasmania is now supporting law reform to decriminalize sex between men.  For
years, the island state has doggedly defended the harsh sodomy law dating
back to the time of its colonization, which prescribes up to 25 years
imprisonment even for private acts between consenting adult males.  Pressure
from international bodies, the federal government and even the local
constituency had failed to sway the state government, but with a legal
challenge now pending before Australia's High Court, negotiation with the
Green Party has finally satisfied their concerns. Tasmania's Attorney General
Roy Groom and other leading government legal personnel met this week with
Greens leader Christine Milne and University of Tasmania law school Professor
Kate Warner.  They worked out a compromise reform in which the sodomy law
will be repealed, but there will be an age of consent of 17 years for anal
sex and a clause allowing for future criminal prosecutions for past acts of
pedophilia.  Soon after that meeting, the House of Assembly, the lower house
of the Tasmanian Parliament, approved the reform plan by a wide margin.
Groom, a key figure in the defense of the sodomy statute, said simply, "I
have mellowed, I suppose.  It has become a negative for Tasmania."  He is one
of the many people who now expect the upper house of the Parliament, the
Legislative Council, to pass the reform measure shortly, even though last
year sodomy repeal was narrowly defeated there.  But Tasmanian Gay and
Lesbian Rights Group leader Rodney Croome warns against complacency at what
may be a very close vote in the Legislative Council, and opponents of reform
have not given up.  The Community and Family Rights Council is trying to
generate pressure from Asian nations to stop what they see as promotion of
homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.
Croome recently told Sydney's "GayWaves" radio program why the reform was so
important that he's devoted years to achieving it, even though the sodomy law
was almost never enforced:
Rodney Croome [tape]:  "It will mean that the Tasmanian government and
private citizens could no longer use that law to justify discrimination
against the gay and lesbian community, which unfortunately continues to
happen now ... they'll no longer be able to do that once these laws are
invalid."
Tasmania's lesbians and gays already have one pay-off from the state
government's change of heart.  Attorney General Groom has given a green light
to the Hobart Queer Film and Video Festival, which had been banned in
previous years.

  Also in Australia this week, the federal Parliament used its power to
strike down the Northern Territory's right-to-die law, the only one of its
kind in the world.  People with AIDS and gays and lesbians had worked for
passage of the state measure, which allowed physicians to assist with the
suicides of terminally ill people with the approval of a psychiatrist and at
least two other doctors.  Four of those suicides had been completed since the
law took effect in July.  Although surveys have shown that three-fourths of
the Australian public support a right-to-die, the national Parliament voted
to override the state law by a comfortable margin in the Senate and a
landslide in the House.

  The 39 people who committed suicide in San Diego this week were led by a
man who'd once sought psychiatric help to eliminate his homosexual impulses,
according to the "Washington Post".  In 1970 Marshall Applewhite had lost his
job on the music faculty of a Catholic college following a scandalous affair
with a male student.  He then checked himself into a mental hospital, seeking
a "cure" for his homosexuality.  It was after that hospitalization that he
began to develop his philosophy that human bodies are merely containers for
the spirits of genderless space aliens who can move to another level of
spiritual existence.  His rejection of sexuality was so great that he and
several other members of the Heaven's Gate group had had themselves
castrated.  

  In Britain this week, after three years of discussion, the Scout
Association made public new equal opportunity policies for both participants
and leaders that include sexual orientation, gender and marital status as
protected categories.  The news generated a storm of protest from the family
of Scouting founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell, Conservative politicians,
parents, and local Scout leaders who threatened to resign, yet Scouting
headquarters stood firm.  Spokesperson John Fogg said, "One of the problems
about discussing this is that in some quarters there is belief that a
homosexual is automatically a pedophile, and this is simply not the case.  We
have vigorous procedures to keep the undesirables out and nothing in this
policy undermines that."  However, it is not the national organization but
the local councils who decide which individuals will actually serve as Scout
leaders.  The offshoot Boy Scouts of America USA continues to defend its ban
on open gays, most recently in a case heard in a federal appeals court.  Both
the British and U.S. Scouting organizations continue to ban atheists.

  There were also insider reports this week that the British Army is no
longer interested in discriminating against gays and lesbians.  Senior Army
officials now in the process of updating discipline and standards guidelines
were said to be planning to reserve disciplinary action and discharges for
personnel whose sexual activities could be shown to actually affect a unit's
operational effectiveness, and that the same standards would be applied to
heterosexual and homosexual activity.  The new Chief of the General Staff Sir
Roger Wheeler was even said to be likely to approve such a proposal.  But
Defense Minister Nicholas Soames was quick to quash the story, making clear
that like the other services the Army would be held to discharging "anyone
who admits to, displays the orientation of, or indulges in homosexuality."
 The Navy in particular is staunchly supportive of the ban, which was upheld
by a vote of the Parliament only last year.  However, with the Labour Party
almost certain to win election in May, and legal challenges to the ban
advancing in European courts, the ban's days appear to be numbered.

  Military police carried out a major raid on the only gay bar in GuangZhou,
China on March 22nd.  At least 10 armed officers stormed into the tiny disco,
which was jammed with about 200 people.  Those patrons on the dance floor
were forced to squat or lie down.  Police brought in floodlights and
videocameras to record the images of everyone present and their own
interrogations of a few of the patrons.  About 20 people were arrested and
taken off for what may be up to 15 days of detention on charges of
hooliganism, since there are no explicit laws in China against homosexuality.
 Police raids have been quite rare in China, and one informant believes this
one may reflect the changing politics following the recent death of Deng
Xiaoping.

  Poland's Parliament this week overwhelmingly approved a new national
constitution, which includes a statement restricting marriage by definition
to one man and one woman.  The bar to legal gay and lesbian marriages was
apparently a bargaining chip in extended negotiations with Solidarity and the
Catholic Church, which also won the option of religious classes in public
schools and at least a vague statement against abortion, while losing in
their efforts to have the constitution declare God's law higher than man's.
 President Aleksander Kwasniewski is now in the midst of a month-long review
of the constitution, to be followed by a public vote on May 25th.

  But Hawai'i will not be holding a state constitutional convention to deal
with its issues regarding same-gender marriages.  A state Supreme Court judge
declared this week that the November ballot initiative to hold the so-called
"Con Con" had failed, and that decision is final.  Although there were more
votes in favor of the convention than against it, the margin was much smaller
than the number of so-called "spoiled ballots", mostly those left blank by
voters choosing to abstain on the question.  Although the state attorney had
interpreted the rather murky laws that apply to mean the convention could be
called by a majority of votes cast, the judge found that it would have had to
win a majority of the ballots cast.  The legal challenge to the attorney
general's decision had been led by the trade unions, but the primary impetus
behind the ballot initiative itself was the desire to block legal same-gender
marriages by a constitutional amendment.  The current ruling leaves the task
of stopping gay and lesbian marriages in Hawai'i entirely in the hands of the
state legislature, which seems now to be stalled once again in unsuccessful
negotiations between the House and the Senate.  Gay and lesbian marriages are
expected to become legal in Hawai'i following a final state Supreme Court
review later this year.

  And finally ... one can only admire the brass of Canada's
ultra-conservative, homophobic Member of Parliament Roseanne Skoke.  This
week, gays and lesbians were visible among those who turned out in a
newly-defined central Nova Scotia riding to deny her the Liberal Party's
nomination for re-election, giving the nod instead to M.P. Francis LeBlanc by
a margin of about 10 percent.  Skoke immediately declared that she would do
nothing to help her colleague win his election.  She went on to say that in
fact she was thinking of running against him.  Then it occurred to her,
despite this loss in her own district and her own party, that really she
should look higher, and put herself forward as a replacement for Nova
Scotia's retiring Liberal premier John Savage.  With that thought, she
insisted that she expected LeBlanc to support her bid for leadership.
 LeBlanc politely said he had not yet decided who he'd be endorsing.
                          ----------*-----------
Sources for this week's report included: Agence France Presse;  The
Associated Press;  The Australian Broadcasting Corp.;  The British
Broadcasting Corp.;  The Canadian Broadcasting Corp.;  The Independent
(London);  The Melbourne Star-Observer;  Press Association (Britain);  The
Daily Telegraph (London);  The Times of London;  The Garden Island (Kauai,
Hawai'i);  The Honolulu Advertiser;  The Honolulu Star-Bulletin;  Rex Wockner
International News Service;  The Herald-Sun (Sydney, Australia);  The
Washington Post; and cyberpress releases from The Marriage Project-Hawai'i.