NewsWrap for the week ending March 9, 2002 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #728, distributed 3-11-02) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Chris Ambidge, Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon] Anchored by Cindy Friedman and Dean Elzinga A Papal spokesperson caused an uproar this week when he declared that gay men cannot be ordained and seemed to blame gay priests for cases of sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clergy. Joaquin Navarro-Valls told the "New York Times" that, "People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained. That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality. But you cannot be in this field." Navarro-Valls suggested that ordinations of gay priests should be annulled, just as the marriage of a layman who later came to recognize he was gay might be. Navarro-Valls' statement carries no binding authority and seems to directly contradict two earlier official statements by the Church. Former priest and writer on the Church and sexuality Eugene Kennedy called Navarro-Valls' remark "an ill-considered trial balloon". But it was the first public response from the Vatican as the Church in the U.S. has begun to take action on a series of molestations by priests. The comments sparked widespread outrage among gay Catholics. For example, author Andrew Sullivan told the "Washington Blade" that, "What Navarro-Valls said is simply beyond belief. He has declared war on his own priests, and deliberately attempted to deflect responsibility for sheltering child molesters by scapegoating good gay priests. It's the most disgusting comment I've heard from the Church in years." Mary Louise Cervone, president of the gay and lesbian Catholic group Dignity/USA, said, "This is nothing more than a vicious and transparent attempt to shift the blame, in an effort to deny institutional culpability." She said the molestations are "about violence against children and abuse of power" and have "nothing to do with sexual orientation." In the mainstream, more than 90% of sexual abuse against minors is committed by heterosexuals. Some experts believe that gay priests are no more likely to violate their vows of celibacy than their heterosexual counterparts. And eliminating gay priests could be devastating to the Church -- research has indicated that gays may comprise one-half of its priests and one-third of its bishops. But there are no gays in Uganda, according to President Yosweri Musveni. He made that assertion while accepting an award for AIDS prevention at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Australia. In 1999 Musveni announced that he had ordered police to round up the nation's gays. Last year human rights watchdog Amnesty International documented reports of police torture of gays in Uganda. And homophobic U.S. Senator Jesse Helms clarified this week that his new willingness to respond to the AIDS epidemic does not represent any alteration in his anti-gay stance. The North Carolina Republican who had long sought to block AIDS funding announced last month that he was ashamed to have done so little in response to the epidemic. But this week he insisted that he was talking only about combating AIDS in Africa, not about AIDS among U.S. gays. Reaffirming his disapproval of what he calls the "homosexual lifestyle," he said, "I don't have any idea on changing my views on that kind of activity, which is the primary cause of the doubling and redoubling of AIDS cases in the U.S." Helms' numbers do not correctly reflect the growth of the epidemic in the U.S. in its second decade. In California, a suspect has been arrested and charged for a high-profile arson hate murder in Santa Barbara. Martin Hartman reportedly turned himself in and confessed this week to killing gay Clint Risetter in late February, pouring gasoline on him as he slept and then igniting it. Police reported that Hartman said he believed Risetter "deserved to die" for being gay and that killing him was "the right thing to do". This week some 500 people attended a candlelight memorial for Risetter, and the district's U.S. Congressmember Lois Capps described the crime on the House floor. She called for passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would make sexual orientation a protected category under federal hate crimes law for the first time. Schools in the state of Washington should soon be safer from harassment, as the state Senate this week followed the state House in passing a bill against bullying, by a vote of 41 to 6. Openly gay Democratic Representative Ed Murray's HB 1444 was amended in the upper house to clarify that its protections apply whether or not victims belong to any of its specified classes, which include sexual orientation. The House is expected to approve the amended version and Democratic Governor Gary Locke is expected to sign it. Nebraska's state Supreme Court this week rejected 6 to 1 a lesbian co-parent's bid to co-adopt her partner's biological child by artificial insemination. The court's majority held strictly to the letter of the state's law, finding that only a biological parent's legally married spouse could adopt the child without the biological parent surrendering her own parental rights. However, the court ducked the broader question as to whether a gay or lesbian couple could together adopt a child whose parent had ceded legal status, something which might be prohibited by Nebraska's extremely broad voter-passed initiative denying legal recognition to same-gender couples. A Scottish court this week awarded full parental rights to a gay man who donated sperm to a lesbian couple, finding that the women did not constitute a "family unit". The plaintiff was named on the birth certificate, had contributed to the child's support, and had visited the 18-month-old boy often. He sued when the couple sought to limit his access. The ruling by Glasgow Sheriff Laura Duncan suggested the issue of legally recognizing gay and lesbian non-biological co-parents might be a matter of public policy to be debated by the parliament. In Canada, the Quebec Court of Appeal has awarded government pensions to surviving members of gay and lesbian couples. The province of Quebec, like Canada, passed a law to extend those pensions to same-gender couples in 1998, but it did not apply retroactively. The Quebec plaintiffs known as the "Quatre Veufs" -- four widows -- successfully argued that the provincial pensions should apply to gay and lesbian couples in which a partner had died since 1977, the year the national Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibited discrimination. The ruling could mean up to C$100,000 for each survivor now covered. It also creates a favorable precedent for a parallel national class action lawsuit seeking C$440-million from the Canada Pension Plan for some 10,000 gay and lesbian survivors. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's visit to Washington, DC this week occasioned protest of Egypt's numerous recent arrests and imprisonment of gay men. The very day of Mubarak's visit, the U.S. State Department issued its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, saying that in Egypt, "There were numerous, credible reports that security forces tortured and mistreated citizens. Reports of torture and mistreatment at police stations remain frequent." The report noted that hundreds of civilian defendants had been deprived of their constitutional rights by the use of Egypt's State Security Emergency courts. One of those courts gave sentences of 3 years at hard labor to 23 of the so-called "Cairo 52" men arrested in a police raid on a gay-friendly Nile riverboat nightclub. Human rights watchdog Amnesty International, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the gay Arab group Al-Fatiha demonstrated and leafleted outside a Council on Foreign Relations luncheon in Mubarak's honor, claiming the Egyptian President is key to changing the situation for gays in his nation. The International Lesbian and Gay Association also issued a statement urging U.S. President George Bush to call for change during Mubarak's visit. Bush apparently never raised any human rights issues with Mubarak. However, United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson did discuss the security courts and human rights violations with Egyptian officials as she visited Egypt last week. In Egypt this week, trial began for the so-called "Damanhour 5", with the World Organization Against Torture reporting that a reliable source had described their situation as "the arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of five men accused of being homosexual." While a growing number of such arrests are coming to international attention, a recent "Newsweek" feature suggested there may be hundreds of other gay men languishing in Egyptian prisons. In the Netherlands, open gay Pim Fortuyn is being labeled a European political force to reckon with as his fledgling anti-immigrant political movement astounded pundits with significant gains in municipal elections this week. Fortuyn had been elected leader of the national Leefbaar Nederlands movement last year only to be deposed last month after he called for an end to Islamic immigration. Fortuyn responded by forming his own new party, Lijst Fortuyn, and its Leefbaar Rotterdam arm this week won more seats in the Rotterdam city council than any other party. Various Leefbaar groups quadrupled their city council seats across the Netherlands. Although that total still comes to just 4% of all the nation's municipal seats, surveys suggest they will take more than 20 of the 150 Parliamentary seats in May national elections -- and according to this week's exit polls, voters who chose Leefbaar groups in local elections support Fortuyn over the national party that dumped him by 3-to-1. And finally... openly gay British TV star Graham Norton celebrated his popular talk show's move from a weekly to a daily broadcast schedule on Channel 4. He said, "It's a daily treat rather just a weekly fix," and slipping into industry lingo he added, "I can't wait to be stripped."