NewsWrap for the week ending July 1, 2000 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #640, distributed 07-03-00) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Chris Ambidge, Martin Rice, Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Rex Wockner, Matt Alsdorf, Greg Gordon & Lucia Chappelle] Anchored by Cindy Friedman and Leo Garcia The first "civil unions" have been contracted in Vermont, the first of the United States to offer all the state-level benefits and responsibilities of marriage to gay and lesbian couples. At one minute after midnight on July 1st as the new law went into effect, Carolyn Conrad and Kathleen Peterson obtained the first civil union license from Brattleboro Town Clerk Annette Cappy. Outside the town hall they exchanged vows before Justice of the Peace Hunter Wilson to make it official. They'd only invited eight people to join them, but a crowd of about 100 gays and lesbians came from around the state to cheer them on, while about a dozen protestors picketed and prayed. Conrad said they hadn't actually intended to be the first in the state, but they wanted to legalize their relationship as soon as possible. Also contracting a civil union on July 1 were Holly Puterbaugh and Lois Farnham, one of the three couples who sued the state in the "Baker" case that led the Vermont Supreme Court to order the legislature to pass the law. Some couples came to Vermont from other states to contract civil unions, even though they can't expect any benefits from them elsewhere without a protracted legal battle. But within an hour of Conrad and Peterson's civil union, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church meeting in Long Beach, California voted to amend its constitution to explicitly prohibit gay and lesbian union ceremonies. The margin of victory was a slim 3%. To become the law of the 2.5-million-member denomination, the ban will have to be ratified by a majority of its 173 regional presbyteries. In 1995, the General Assembly passed a similar ban, but the presbyteries failed to ratify it. In May the denomination's highest court found that ministers could choose to bless gay and lesbian couples as long as it was clear the ceremony was not a marriage. The United Methodist Church's General Assembly reaffirmed that denomination's ban on union ceremonies in May, but the issue continues to divide its members as well. July 1st marked the end of the suspension of Chicago's Reverend Gregory Dell, the first minister in the 8.4-million-member denomination to be convicted of disobedience for blessing same-gender couples. But while Dell was moving back into his office, new formal complaints were being processed against two other ministers on the same charge. In Maine, Bishop Susan Wolfe Hassinger announced that Reverend Susan Davenport had admitted to blessing a same-gender couple in 1999, but had asked forgiveness and promised not to do it again. In Nebraska, Bishop of Omaha Joel Martinez confirmed that a complaint had been filed against Reverend Mark Kemling for blessing a gay couple in early June. Kemling said, "I don't believe I've done anything wrong. The church's position regarding homosexuality is unjust and needs to be challenged." Omaha was also where Reverend Jimmy Creech was the subject of two church trials for blessing lesbian and gay couples, the first narrowly failing to convict him, the second finding him guilty and stripping him of his credentials. But in Brazil, a panel of 23 judges upheld a ruling forcing the National Social Security Institute to give gays and lesbians in "stable" relationships the same public pension benefits as married heterosexuals. Although the agency was forced by an earlier court ruling to begin extending the benefits in June, it has appealed that ruling repeatedly -- and unsuccessfully. The agency may yet appeal to Brazil's Supreme Court. And in Spain, Navarro has become the first of the seventeen regional governments to allow unmarried couples to adopt, including gay and lesbian couples. The state parliament approved a law that says that couples who enjoy "a free and public union in an affectionate relationship, independent of sexual orientation ... can adopt children with the same rights and duties as those couples united in matrimony." Three other Spanish states allow gays and lesbians to serve as foster parents. But back in the U.S., a split decision by the Supreme Court affirmed that the Boy Scouts of America can discriminate against gays, even in states where sexual orientation discrimination is prohibited. Although in the past the court has forced large male civic organizations to accept women, five of the nine justices accepted that it is central to the Scouts' mission to express their moral position against homosexuality, and that forcing them to accept a gay Scoutmaster would interfere with that expression. The other four justices rejected the idea that including gays would "unduly burden" the Scouts. The case began when the Scouts dismissed Eagle Scout James Dale from serving as an assistant scoutmaster in New Jersey, after a newspaper interview ed him in his role as leader of a campus gay group. Dale earlier won his bid for reinstatement in both New Jersey's Appeals and Supreme Courts, before the U.S. high court reversed them. Now it remains to be seen if support is withdrawn from Scout troops by states and private groups that ban anti-gay discrimination. Yet another U.S. Supreme Court ruling involved New Jersey's hate crimes law, but it left intact the idea of stronger sentences for bias-motivated crimes. In another split decision, a majority found that since Charles Apprendi was given a sentence longer than the maximum prescribed for the charges against him, it was as if the hate crimes enhancement were a separate charge. Therefore those five justices believed the bias motivation should have been determined by a jury on the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. Under New Jersey law, it was determined by a judge on the weaker "preponderance of evidence" standard. New Jersey's Governor and Attorney-General immediately promised to revise the law in the next legislative session. Except for North Carolina and one of two laws in California, all the other state hate crimes laws already require a determination by a jury. In Britain, David Copeland was found guilty of three murders in the bombing of Soho's gay Admiral Duncan pub. Although Copeland freely admitted to setting that bomb and two others in April 1999, he had hoped to avoid murder convictions by reason of "diminished responsibility," as defense psychiatrists diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. After four weeks of trial, the jury readily agreed with the prosecution that Copeland has only a personality disorder and convicted him of the murders. He was immediately sentenced to six life terms, one for each of the bombs and one each for the murders of gays John Light and Nik Moore and of their non-gay friend Andrea Dykes. The first two bombs were set in Black and Bangladeshi neighborhoods as part of self-identified Nazi Copeland's plan to start a race war; they may have injured more than fifty people. The Soho bomb Copeland said was "personal" because of his hatred of gays; it injured more than eighty people, including several amputations. In California, Governor Gray Davis signed the first law in the U.S. to prohibit exclusion from juries based on sexual orientation. Several other categories are protected as well, codifying prior legal decisions, but gays and lesbians had never been recognized in this way until a California appeals court ruling earlier this year. Attorneys will be prohibited from using peremptory challenges to remove gays and lesbians from juries based solely on their sexual orientation or on the perception that their orientation alone would indicate bias. In Australia, a committee of the national Senate gave a favorable recommendation to an Anti-Genocide bill that includes sexual orientation as a protected category. The sexual orientation clause was opposed by the Christian Democrats and the veterans group Returned and Services League, who viewed it as a "thinly-veiled attempt to promote the cause of militant homosexuality." The League's submission in particular included so many myths, misconceptions and phony research from the U.S. religious right, that both activist Rodney Croome and the bill's sponsor gay Senator Brian Greig compared it to Nazi propaganda against the Jews. The bill moves next to the Attorney General until October. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe voted by more than a two-thirds majority to urge its 41 member nations to grant asylum to gay and lesbian refugees from homophobic persecution. The same resolution called on them to give bi-national gay and lesbian couples the same residency rights as heterosexual couples. The Recommendation moves next to the Council of Europe's Council of Ministers. Azerbaijan has decriminalized private non-commercial intercourse between consenting adult males, as part of its bid for membership in the Council of Europe. Under Soviet rule, such acts had been punishable by up to three years' imprisonment. The law had often been used by corrupt police for extortion against gay men. And finally... As gay and lesbian pride was celebrated around the world in memory of the June 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, 50,000 people marched in Vienna. The heart of that city is the Ringstrasse, a circular street where traffic is only allowed to move in one direction. But when the pride marchers took over, they went against the usual flow, celebrating their theme, "Vienna goes the other way."