NewsWrap for the week ending October 25th, 1997 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #500, distributed 10-27-97) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Brian Nunes, Rex Wockner, Chris Ambidge, Greg Gordon & Lucia Chappelle, and anchored by Cindy Friedman and Tory Christopher] The U.S. Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee held a hearing this week on ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to establish federal protections from workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. After a late start, seven men gave testimony before a packed room. A gay attorney described the withdrawal of a job offer after coming out to the prospective employer, while a gay restaurant worker spoke of hearing he would never be promoted to manager because of his sexual orientation. Neither had any legal recourse. The owner of a pizza shop and the Chief Executive Officer of Bell Atlantic, which employs 140,000 people, used their experiences to demonstrate that ENDA would not be harmful to employers, and that practicing equal treatment makes good business sense. Two religious leaders and a civil rights attorney also stated their support for enacting ENDA. But to the amazement of Committee chair and leading ENDA co-sponsor Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, there was no one willing to testify in opposition to the measure. Although Jeffords tried to suggest that meant that the changes in the latest edition of ENDA had satisfied all objections, it was in fact a conservative boycott of the hearing. Notably, the religious right groups the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition were busy making statements to the media instead of the Committee. Those groups continued to claim that ENDA would create preferential treatment and even quotas for hiring gays and lesbians, even though the text of the bill explicitly prohibits them. The hearing was also the occasion for Jeffords to release a study he'd requested from the Government Accounting Office in hopes of putting another common fear of ENDA to rest: the Congress' independent investigators found that there had been no significant increase in lawsuits in those states which have anti-bias laws. There was a victory for workplace rights this week as the U.S.' third-largest school district, Chicago, agreed to stop screening job applicants for HIV. The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund had taken up the case of a "John Doe" teacher who had first been required to reveal his HIV status only to see the processing of his application dropped as a result, on two separate occasions. The school district settled out of court for undisclosed terms, but promised both to reserve all health screening until a conditional job offer was on the table and to adopt a policy statement that individuals with HIV and AIDS pose no threat to the health of others in a classroom setting. Civil rights protections for gays and lesbians took an unexpected hit this week when the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Cincinnati, Ohio's Issue 3 for a second time. The city's voters had passed the ballot initiative in 1993 to not only repeal an existing local civil rights law, but to prohibit all future recognition of gays and lesbians as a minority group. When the U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down the almost-identical Colorado initiative Amendment 2, it also vacated the earlier Cincinnati decision and told the 6th Circuit to reconsider. But instead of following the high court, the same 3-judge panel reached the same conclusions as they had before the top court's ruling. The appellate panel found that the local ordinance did not disempower gays and lesbians politically in the same fashion as the statewide Colorado measure had, and denied that the voters had acted out of prejudice in passing Issue 3. The judges also lifted the injunction against Issue 3 that has prevented it from ever being enforced, a move that's expected to first impact the city's own Equal Employment Opportunity policy. Issue 3's opponents will appeal the new ruling, either back to the Supreme Court or to an en banc hearing of all the 6th Circuit's judges. Another anti-gay initiative, this one to repeal Maine's new statewide law banning anti-gay bias, has officially qualified for a statewide vote, it was announced this week. The balloting has not yet been scheduled but is required by the state constitution to be held between December and April. The rare "people's veto" action allowed for in the state constitution has also served to stop the civil rights protections from taking effect unless and until the voting confirms them, in what's expected to be a neck-and-neck race. In the Canadian province of Ontario, a request for a pride proclamation has driven a mayor into seclusion at the height of an election campaign. The Ontario Human Rights Commission determined that London Mayor Dianne Haskett had illegally discriminated against HALO, the Homophile Association of London Ontario, when she denied their 1995 request for a proclamation of a Gay Pride Weekend. As a result, Haskett and the city are jointly responsible for paying HALO a $10,000 fine, and she decided to defray half of it by taking a 3-week leave of absence. Her standing aside also makes it possible for the City Council to grant HALO a proclamation without her having to be a party to it. In addition, it gives new life to the moribund election campaign of her leading challenger, deputy mayor Grant Hopcroft, by putting him in charge of the city while Haskett has determined to withdraw from the media and the voters for the rest of the campaign. Although Haskett is adamant that she will not be put in a position of advocating for gays and lesbians because of her religious beliefs, she insists that she does not judge or condemn them nor advocate for discrimination against them. Canada's largest union and a coalition of other plaintiffs were back before the Ontario Court of Appeals this week in an effort to establish equal pension rights for employees' gay and lesbian domestic partners. Members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees all pay into its private pension plan, and the union wants its gay and lesbian members to be able to reap equal benefits from it, but federal tax regulations bar pension funds from recognizing same-gender partners. An earlier Ontario decision relied on a national Supreme Court ruling that allowed the government to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples in the distribution of public pension payments -- but the plaintiffs believe this should not force private funds to discriminate. Twenty Filipino foreign workers have been deported from Qatar with another 16 soon to follow, on the suspicion of homosexual activity. The men were rounded up in an October 1st sweep of barber shops and clothing stores in Doha which police had been keeping under surveillance. A special commission has been investigating the August prison riots in Jamaica in which inmates killed 16 of their fellow prisoners they believed to be gay. The rioting was triggered when the Corrections Commissioner announced plans to distribute condoms to both prisoners and guards to prevent the spread of HIV, an announcement both inmates and staff took as an extreme insult for implying they were gay. But although the guards' union at the time said the condom plan had "poured buckets of dung" on them and walked off the job in protest, two senior police officers testified this week that guards at Kingston's General Penitentiary had in fact been having sex with inmates and paying them off with preferential treatment. By contrast with the grossly overcrowded conditions for prisoners there, an inspector described the gay inmates' cell block as "like heaven...the cleanest block in the institution." Other testimony has noted the inadequate training and weapons of the prison guards. 57-million condoms were recalled in the U.S. this week because some may break before their expiration dates. Although manufacturer Ansell Personal Products is withdrawing the suspect items from stores, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers to check those they may have already purchased. At issue are several styles of Ansell's "Contempo", "Prime" and "Lifestyle" brands with expiration dates of October 1997 or later. They can be returned to either the point of purchase or the manufacturer. Only those produced in the U.S. are at risk; those distributed in Australia are produced in Japan. In the Australian state of New South Wales, 5,000 angry gays and lesbians turned out for a rally this week to demand that the age of consent for gay male sex be lowered to equal that for heterosexual and lesbian acts. A bill to drop the gay age of consent from 18 to 16 was to have been introduced in September, but its supporters in the Parliament were scared off when homophobic Member of Parliament Fred Nile seemed able to require that a vote be taken with no floor debate whatever. Gays and lesbians are also lobbying the state's Opposition Coalition to allow its members to vote their consciences, without making much headway to date. Several different Parliamentary strategies are now being pursued to force Premier Bob Carr's state government to act for equalization. It's now as official as it can be that openly gay singer Elton John's tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, is the best-selling single of all time. The Guinness Book of World Records and Book of British Hit singles announced this week that they're accepting Mercury Records' figure of nearly 32-million copies shipped as exceeding the estimated 30 million copies sold of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas". But while the Crosby tune took 55 years to accumulate its total, "Candle in the Wind 97" outpaced it in a mere 37 days. During that period, "Candle" topped the charts in 22 countries around the world and raised millions of pounds for the late princess' favorite charities. And finally ... for the first time in almost 40 years, a new film opened this week that depicts the life of 19th century literary giant Oscar Wilde. Although critics had mixed responses to the franker treatment of the writer's homosexuality in Brian Gilbert's "Wilde", and Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland distanced himself from the production for what he saw as historical errors, there's no question that actor Stephen Fry was thrilled to play the lead. Fry bears a distinct resemblance to Wilde and believes he may have been born to portray him. At the London premiere, Fry demonstrated to the media just how much he loves Wilde's work: he dropped his trousers to display boxer shorts inscribed with quotations from Wilde ... including "We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."