NewsWrap for the week ending June 10, 2000 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #637, distributed 06-12-00) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Chris Ambidge, Martin Rice, Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Rex Wockner, Greg Gordon & Lucia Chappelle] Anchored by Leo Garcia and Cindy Friedman Same-gender couples in Brazil will have the same rights as married couples to inherit each other's public pension and social security benefits, under new regulations announced this week. One partner will also be able to declare the other as a dependent on income tax returns. This is the most extensive legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships to date in all of Latin America. A recent court ruling led to the policy changes by Brazil's National Social Security Institute. Although a bill to establish registered partnerships has stalled in the parliament in this election year, its sponsor Marta Suplicy believes the new regulations will encourage its passage later on. In the U.S., the "Big 3" automakers made a joint announcement with the United Auto Workers union that they will extend spousal health benefits to the same-gender partners of their gay and lesbian employees. It's a significant step not only for the gays and lesbians among more than 460,000 workers affected, but as an indicator that the benefits are becoming a standard business practice. Until now heavy industry has lagged behind white-collar sectors in extending health benefits to domestic partners, and has even been slow to provide equal opportunity protections to gays and lesbians. The joint statement said the move is consistent with the corporations' "commitment to diversity" and responds to "competitive trends" among the Fortune 500. It follows a commitment won in the United Auto Workers' last contract negotiations for the corporations to study the benefit. The Big 3 are General Motors Corporation, Ford Motor Corporation and the Chrysler division of DaimlerChrysler. Other DaimlerChrysler divisions are not affected. Also making a big announcement this week was singer Sinead O'Connor, who announced in the UK recording industry magazine "Hot Press" that she is a lesbian. She wrote, "I am a lesbian. I love men but I prefer sex with women and I prefer romantic relationships with women." In a soon-to-be-published interview in the U.S. magazine "Curve," O'Connor said, "I'm a lesbian ... although I haven't been very open about that, and throughout most of my life I've gone out with blokes because I haven't necessarily been terribly comfortable about being a lesbian. But I actually am a lesbian." O'Connor has had a series of high-profile relationships with men, including a marriage to musician John Reynolds. She has two children as a result, sharing custody of her 3-year-old daughter with journalist John Waters and raising her 12-year-old son Jake alone. Just who has the right to visitation with a child was the topic of a closely-watched U.S. Supreme Court case decided this week. Because family issues are determined by the states, it is very rare for the U.S. high court to consider a family law question at all. Gays and lesbians had interests on both sides of the case. On the one hand, gays and lesbians have often had to fight for their parental rights against homophobic relatives and others. On the other hand, gay and lesbian non-biological co-parents have often had to fight to maintain their relationships with children after their partnerships have dissolved. Ultimately, the Supreme Court's ruling in "Troxel versus Granville" had little impact either way. On the plus side, the justices acknowledged that there is now a great diversity of family units. Most of them affirmed that a fit parent's decisions on visitation must be given some special weight in the courts, but they did not take any positions that might disturb any of the recent advances in recognition of non-biological co-parents. The very limited ruling was favorably received across the political spectrum, but will inevitably result in still more lawsuits before both state courts and the high court itself. A U.S. appeals court this week found that a transgendered person has standing to sue under a federal law against sex discrimination. Lucas Rosa, a biological male whose dress and appearance are feminine, tried to obtain a car loan from West Park Bank in Holyoke, Massachusetts, but the loan officer refused to provide an application unless Rosa returned looking more masculine. The bank claimed it was a legitimate question of identification. A federal district judge threw out Rosa's lawsuit on the grounds that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act did not cover sexual orientation and did not stop a bank from telling someone how to dress. But this week the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals said the case should be tried. Rosa was represented by Jenifer Levi of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, who said the precedent-setting decision "recognizes that federal law prohibits different treatment because of sex, including when it is different treatment of transgendered or gay people." The British Columbia Supreme Court reached a similar decision this week, in the case of a transsexual thrown out of volunteer training to counsel rape victims because she had not grown up as a woman. Justice William Davies found that Kimberly Nixon is legally a woman under the province's Vital Statistics Act. He wrote that human rights law cannot be found to exclude someone from its protections "merely because that person or group is not readily identifiable as being either male or female." He refused the request from Vancouver's Rape Relief Society to stop Kimberly Nixon's complaint from receiving its long-delayed hearing before a human rights tribunal next month. Nixon's attorney barbara findlay said, "It's the first court ruling in Canada that says transgendered individuals are protected by human rights legislation." A Texas state appeals court this week struck down the state's sodomy law, saying it violated the Equal Rights Amendment of the state constitution. The so-called Homosexual Conduct law applies only to acts between people of the same gender. For the 2-to-1 majority of the Texas 14th Court of Appeals, Justice John Anderson wrote that, "The simple fact is, the same behavior is criminal for some but not for others, based solely on the sex of the individuals who engage in the behavior." The court also chided the legislature, saying, "Our constitution does not protect morality; it does, however, guarantee equality under the law." The ruling came in a notorious case in which police literally broke into a private home and arrested two men they found there engaged in consensual sex, John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner. The police had received a false tip that there was an armed intruder on the premises. The men had to spend more than 24 hours in jail before being released on $200 bail each, and were later fined $200 each when they pleaded no contest in order to pursue their constitutional challenge to the law. The state attorney general's office will appeal the ruling to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Zimbabwe's first post-colonial president Canaan Banana this week began his year-long prison term for eleven convictions under the national sodomy law. Nine years of his ten-year sentence have been suspended. Most of his crimes against nine different men were sexual harassment during his 1980's presidency against lower-level staff serving under him, although his chief victim he drugged and then raped. Banana was a distinguished international diplomat, ordained minister and head of the religion department at the University of Zimbabwe before his trial, and the married father of four has denied all the charges against him. Another high-profile criminal trial began this week in London, where David Copeland is accused of setting three bombs last year that injured at least 130 people and killed three. The final, fatal bombing was at Soho's gay Admiral Duncan pub. Copeland has admitted to setting all three bombs, but is hoping for manslaughter rather than murder convictions based on diminished responsibility. Copeland is a self-identified Nazi who hoped to start a race war in Britain, but he said the Admiral Duncan bombing was "personal" because he hates gays. His trial will continue for another one or two weeks. A hate crimes bill including acts motivated by homophobia was passed by the New York state Senate this week by a 4-to-1 margin. All of the opposing votes were Republican Senators while all of the Democrats voted in favor. For 11 years, the Democratic-majority state Assembly has passed such bills, but the Republican-dominated Senate had never before allowed one to come to a floor vote. The Senate would long since have passed a bill if the Assembly had been willing to drop the references to lesbians and gays. This year the Senate acted at the request of Republican Governor George Pataki and in the face of intense lobbying by the state's Hate Crimes Bill Coalition. The bill will become New York's first law ever to use the words gay, lesbian or sexual orientation. And finally... Pride really is everywhere. This week the CIA, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, celebrated gay and lesbian pride month at its headquarters in an event featuring openly gay Congressmember Barney Frank. It was actually the second pride observance for the CIA, but like most of the Agency's activities the first had gone unreported. The equally secretive National Security Administration sent over a busload of its gay and lesbian employees to join in, for a total of about 100 agents. Through 1991, homosexuality was automatic grounds for rejection or dismissal from both those agencies. But since President Bill Clinton's 1995 executive order against sexual orientation discrimination in federal government employment, gay and lesbian employee groups have organized at both agencies. The CIA's group ANGLE, Agency Network of Gay and Lesbian Employees, received official recognition from the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity. But although two ANGLE members were allowed to speak with a "Washington Post" reporter, they were not allowed to give their names. They may be out of the closet on the job, but being on the job can still mean being undercover.