NewsWrap for the week ending March 16, 2002 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #729, distributed 3-18-02) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Chris Ambidge, Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon] Anchored by Christopher Gaal and Cindy Friedman Australia was rocked this week when the Prime Minister's parliamentary secretary launched a verbal attack on openly gay High Court Justice Michael Kirby on the Senate floor. Liberal Party Senator from New South Wales Bill Heffernan was calling for the establishment of a royal commission to investigate child sexual abuse, a topic that many call an "obsession" for him. But taking off from Kirby's role in a decision to grant a High Court appeal to a Roman Catholic priest sentenced to more than ten years imprisonment for molesting altar boys, Heffernan declared Kirby unfit to sit on such cases. Referring to materials from NSW's notorious Wood Royal Commission of several years ago -- which was established to investigate police corruption, but focused at length on age-of-consent violations between males -- Heffernan alleged that Kirby had "regularly trawled for rough trade at the Darlinghurst Wall" in Sydney, paid young men for sex, and used his government vehicle in the process. Heffernan claimed he had new evidence which he was sending on to police, but did not enter it into the parliamentary record. Few have given credence to Heffernan's remarks, which are protected from any lawsuit by parliamentary privilege. Both the Wood Royal Commission and the NSW police had previously found allegations against an unnamed judge presumed to be Kirby to be unfounded and unsubstantiated -- or as a witness described them, "bitchy gossip". For example, on an occasion in which Kirby's car was thought to have been spotted, Kirby himself was many miles away in Canberra. One of the sex workers believed to be a "key witness" for Heffernan was discredited by the court in the lawsuit that ultimately cleared openly gay attorney John Marsden of allegations he'd paid for sex with underage teens. NSW police are expected to decide in the coming week whether to investigate Kirby further after they receive the documents Heffernan mailed to them. But that's not likely to happen -- the "Sunday Age" newspaper reports those consist of a 1994 driver's record and a 100-word declaration from a former sex worker, neither of which actually alleges illegal conduct by Kirby. Kirby responded with a brief media release saying, "Senator Heffernan's homophobic accusations against me in the Senate are false and absurd. If he has such accusations, he should approach the proper authorities, not slander a fellow citizen in Parliament. Insofar as he attempts to interfere in the performance of my duties as a judge I reject the attempt utterly." The Australian Senate passed a motion ordering Heffernan to apologize for his remarks, but he's done nothing of the kind. The committee on parliamentary privileges will consider whether the Senate itself should apologize to Kirby. Numerous politicians, legal groups, trade unions, and others -- including most of the media -- leaped to criticize Heffernan and to defend Kirby as an outstanding jurist. But Prime Minister John Howard was not among them. While declaring that Heffernan is standing down as the Cabinet's Parliamentary Secretary for the duration, Howard is not firing him and referred to their close personal friendship, as well as defending Heffernan's right to speak freely in parliament. Howard made only a lukewarm reference to the respect Kirby enjoys within his profession, and suggested a new mechanism needs to be created to handle allegations against federal judges. He even indicated that it might not require a legal action to establish the "proved misbehavior" needed for Parliament to unseat a judge, saying, "A proven misbehavior under the Constitution can take many forms and cover a lot of conduct. It's not defined." And Howard's Attorney-General Darryl Williams, who by tradition should be a key defender of the judiciary, has not stood up for Kirby, to the outrage of several leading law professors. Howard's ruling Coalition has blocked every piece of gay-positive federal legislation during his tenure. The situation has raised many broader issues regarding political interference with the judiciary as well as the limits of parliamentary privilege. But sadly, an online poll suggests that Heffernan has in one sense correctly read public sentiment, as respondents have affirmed by about 2-to-1 that an openly gay judge should not preside over sex offense cases. There have been two significant developments this week in Egypt's campaign of prosecutions against gay men. The so-called "Damanhour Five" were convicted of debauchery in the Nile Delta Misdemeanor Court and sentenced to three years hard labor followed by three years probation. This is only one of a series of such cases, although homosexuality per se is not explicitly prohibited under Egyptian law. But this week the Egyptian State Information Service, the national government's official information service, responded to a member of Britain's RainbowNetwork with a lengthy statement condemning homosexuality and Western moves to protect gay and lesbian civil rights. Citing Islamic teachings that sex should be reserved for heterosexual marriage, the e-mail said that "[H]omosexuality is socially detested and legally condemned" in Egypt. The statement repeatedly described homosexuality as "perverted" and characterized it as a threat to the family and associated with physical and psychological illness. Elsewhere in Africa, Zimbabwe's gays and lesbians resigned themselves to a fifth Presidential term for one of the world's most vocal and virulent homophobes, Robert Mugabe, following elections this week. Foreign observers reported widespread violence, intimidation and election fraud that have led some Western governments to drag their feet in recognizing the outcome. But the group GALZ, Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, took heart from the high voter turnout and what's generally viewed as the nation's best approximation of multi-party democracy since Mugabe's ZANU-PF party took over from British rule. In the U.S., final rules for federal compensation for families of victims of the September 11th attacks effectively exclude most gay and lesbian domestic partners. Unless the victim explicitly named the partner in a will, the partner's standing to receive compensation is determined by the probate laws of their state of residence -- and gay and lesbian partners are so recognized only in Vermont and Hawai'i. The fund's administrator Kenneth Feinberg seemed quite dismissive of the problem in a TV appearance this week on "Meet the Press", but softened somewhat in an interview with the gay and lesbian "Washington Blade". While hoping that in most cases gay and lesbian survivors could work something out with victims' legally recognized families, he did say he might intervene to prevent an injustice, offering the hypothetical example of a gay victim whose blood relatives hadn't spoken to him for 15 years. There may be only 30 or 40 same-gender domestic partners who might seek the compensation, but more than a million dollars is at stake in each case. The Kansas state Supreme Court has negated a transwoman's marriage to a man in a high-profile inheritance case. Marshall Gardiner died without a will, and his estranged son Joe challenged transwoman J'Noel Gardiner's right as Marshall's wife to inherit his two-and-a-half-million-dollar estate. This week's unanimous high court decision overturned a landmark state appeals court ruling. Whereas the Court of Appeal had undertaken an extensive review of scientific literature to reject what it called "a rigid and simplistic approach" to determining sex in favor of consideration of much more than judgments made at birth, the state Supreme Court went no further than Webster's Dictionary, whose definitions rely heavily on the ability to procreate. While admitting that J'Noel had, in the Chief Justice's words, "traveled a long and difficult road," the state's high court found her to still be a male, and her marriage to violate Kansas' law recognizing marriage only between "two parties of the opposite sex." The ruling per se cannot be appealed further, although J'Noel's attorneys are looking for some basis to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Some expect the state Supreme court's ruling to open a can of worms, not only in apparently legitimizing transsexuals' marriages to partners of their own self-identified gender, but also for possibly invalidating marriages of sterile heterosexuals with its reliance on reproductive ability to define sex. And finally... it was quite a gay week in the world of entertainment. British singer Will Young, rocketed to stardom as winner of the TV show "Pop Idol" and with his first release "Evergreen" setting a UK first week sales record, publicly identified himself as a gay man with a low-key statement in the tabloid "News of the World". The announcement surprised no one and ha sn't hurt his sales or fan base at all -- it's remarkable only because no one of comparable status has come out so early in their career before. Meanwhile, as the awards season progresses towards Oscar night, the Directors Guild of America honored open gays Alan Ball and Todd Holland for their work on "Six Feet Under" and "Malcolm in the Middle"... while the Screen Actors Guild gave Best Comedy Series Actor and Actress honors to Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally of NBC's gay-lead sitcom "Will & Grace". NBC then announced it's investing a whopping 300 million dollars to renew "Will & Grace" for another three years. Also at the SAG awards, openly gay British Oscar nominee Sir Ian McKellen took Best Supporting Actor film honors for his role as "Gandalf" in "Lord of the Rings". As it happened, McKellen had been onstage opening the show just minutes before his victory was announced, so when he returned for his trophy he joked, "I thought I'd had my turn."