NewsWrap for the week ending August 15th, 1998 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #542, distributed 08-17-98) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Graham Underhill, Martin Rice, Rex Wockner, Greg Gordon & Lucia Chappelle] Anchored by Leo Garcia and Cindy Friedman The highest judicial authority of the U.S. United Methodist Church ruled this week that ministers who preside at gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies can be tried in a church court and disciplined or defrocked. The Judicial Council ruled that a statement adopted by the General Conference in 1996, that "Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches," is a law and not merely a guideline. That was in question because of its placement in the church's Social Principles rather than its list of chargeable offenses or chapter on the ministry of ordained clergy. The 9-member panel was influenced in part by the "shall not" wording of the statement, as well as by the intentions of the General Conference that adopted it. The hearing was requested by Methodist bishops in the wake of the March trial of Reverend Jimmy Creech, who celebrated the commitment of a lesbian couple. His jury split on the question of law versus guideline, and fell one vote short of finding him guilty of disobedience. Creech said, "This decision validates an institutional form of bigotry and I will not be bound by it." But same-gender marriage opponent Oklahoma City Bishop Bruce Blake said, "The key to our connection [as a denomination] is authority, not agreement. If people disagree with the church's position, they can work through the channels of the church." That appears to be what most liberal Methodist clergy will do, abide by the ruling for now and lobby for change at the General Conference in 2000. The United Methodist Church is the second-largest Christian denomination in the U.S. In Britain, an Anglican priest has come out publicly as a gay man who celebrated a commitment ceremony with his partner, who lives with him in the rectory. Simon Long is risking his job to protest the anti-gay resolutions of the recent global Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops. That group was unwilling even to allow a scheduled presentation by gay and lesbian clergy. Long said, "Why should I allow the church's negative attitude to drive me away from something I value as deeply as I value the church and the liturgy? I want to be able to work towards change from within the system." Long has been involved with his partner Kevin Crowe, a Catholic, for about eight years, and they had a "service of union" about five years ago in the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church. Long serves the rural parish of Six Saints Circa Holt in Leicestershire, where he says parishioners "turn a blind eye" to Kevin's presence "because they quite like me." French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has received some 60,000 identical postcards protesting plans for federal recognition of unmarried couples, including gay and lesbian couples. The legislation expected to be debated in the Parliament in October will extend nearly all the financial and social benefits of legal marriage to unmarried couples. The main exceptions are adoption and government-supported in vitro fertilization services. The protest postcards are a project of the ultra-conservative group The Future of Culture. They describe domestic partnership as "an extremist ideological project that aims to destroy the family, the foundation stone of French society. This amounts to a choice for a decadent society that will throw us back 20 centuries ... [and] will destroy the remains of civilization that still separate us from barbarism." Same-gender marriage is absolutely not legal in Fiji, despite a provision in its new constitution against discrimination based on sexual orientation. That was the announcement this week by Fiji's attorney general Ratu Eruate Tavai. He was trying to reassure religious groups who were seeking a constitutional amendment to specifically prohibit gay and lesbian marriages. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week unanimously approved a first-of-its-kind requirement that businesses offering any discounts for married couples extend them to domestic partners as well. Even though this law will have a broader reach than the city's controversial Equal Benefits Ordinance, it had support from two local business organizations and essentially no business opposition. In fact the bill's sponsor, openly gay Supervisor Mark Leno, was unable to think of a San Francisco business that wasn't already in compliance. There were significant rulings this week on campaign spending complaints in connection with Hawaii's upcoming ballot initiative against same-gender marriage. A series of complaints by gay activist Bill Woods against the anti- marriage groups Hawaii's Future Today and Save Traditional Marriage '98 were dismissed by the state's Campaign Spending Commission. The Commission also rejected a complaint by two groups opposing the initiative, Protect Our Constitution and Protect Our Constitution/Human Rights Campaign, against the Hawai'i Christian Coalition, but that complaint had at least led the Hawai'i Christian Coalition to officially register as a non-candidate political committee. The Commission is still considering two other Protect Our Constitution complaints against the national Christian Coalition and the Hawai'i Family Forum, an affiliate of James Dobson's Colorado-based Focus on the Family. The Forum has been running radio ads about the initiative which Protect Our Constitution claims cross the line from "education" into advocacy in support of the ballot measure. Meanwhile, the state Attorney General's office has issued an opinion that the state's political spending cap of $1,000 per person per ballot measure per election is an unconstitutional violation of free speech. Although activist attorney Dan Foley questions whether the Attorney General actually has the legal authority to decide a constitutional question, the Campaign Spending Commission is clearly being guided by the opinion. This is likely to send spending on the initiative, already projected to run into the millions, even higher. Australian gay activist Brian Grieg has been elected in a statewide vote by Western Australia's Democrats to be their number one candidate for the federal Senate. Grieg has previously served as a national spokesperson for the Australian Council for Lesbian and Gay Rights and as a spokesperson for Western Australia's Gay and Lesbian Equality group. He's been a leading advocate for anti-discrimination legislation and for equalization of the age of consent. Big Ben blushed this week in an unusual protest of Britain's unequal age of consent. Some 40 members of the direct action group YouthSpeak projected a pink "16" on the historic clock face for about 20 minutes before police intervened. Sixteen is the age of consent for heterosexuals, while the age of consent for sex between men is 18. Although the British government has promised to reintroduce an equalization measure in a few months, YouthSpeak has been unable to obtain any assurances that 16- and 17-year-old gays will not continue to be prosecuted for age of consent violations in the meantime. Students at the University of Wisconsin can't be required to pay for campus organizations they object to, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled this week. Three Christian students had complained that their required activities fees were supporting the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Campus Center and 17 other groups whose politics they didn't like. The court rejected the idea that supporting private groups engaging in political and ideological activities was relevent to the educational mission of the University -- but also declared that even if it were relevent, the students' free speech rights took precedence. The court is leaving up to the university the headache of deciding how to deal with the differing opinions of thousands of students who've each been supplying 10 to 30 cents' worth of funding to each of dozens of campus groups. The same lawyer who represented the students in this case is pursuing a similar case against the University of Minnesota. British prisoner John Pilley will soon become the first to undergo sex reassignment surgery while in custody. Pilley, who is serving a life sentence, has had extensive counseling and has been allowed to cross-dress in his cell. Guards will stand by during his stay in a private clinic except when he is actually in surgery. Afterwards, he will be known as Jane Pilley and will be moved to a women's prison. And finally ... an unusual landmark was passed in the AIDS epidemic, as this week's edition of the San Francisco gay paper the "Bay Area Reporter" had no AIDS obituaries. That's something that hasn't happened for more than 17 years, and for most of those years an average of about a dozen obits ran two or three pages every week. But San Francisco's gay community has exhibited the dramatic U.S. national decrease in AIDS deaths since 1995, and B.A.R. obits had fallen to about four per week. News editor Mike Salinas described the days leading up to the current edition's deadline, saying, "It was like watching a no-hitter in baseball unfolding. We didn't really want to discuss it until it became obvious that it was going to happen. We held our breath waiting." Recalling an old mystery novel, the B.A.R. entitled its editorial, "Death Takes a Holiday."