NewsWrap for the week ending September 28, 2002 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #757, distributed 9-30-02) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Chris Ambidge, Jason Lin, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle & Greg Gordon] Anchored by Cindy Friedman & Jon Beaupré Israel is about to have its first openly gay member of parliament. The gay-supportive left-wing Meretz Party announced this week that it's selected long-time civil rights activist Professor Uzi Even to replace a retiring Member of the Knesset in early November. Even told the "Jerusalem Post" that, "My joining the Knesset would be a very important step for every gay. The message is you no longer have to be ashamed. You can even be elected to the Knesset." His legislative interests include education, science and technology. He promised to work for gay and lesbian civil rights, including equal treatment of same-gender couples for taxation and inheritance. Israel's powerful religious right immediately denounced the appointment, with Nissim Zeev of the far-right Shas Party telling a radio audience that Meretz is "adopting abominations," "making sodomite vermin kosher" and taking "a further step toward moral deterioration." But Even told Reuters that, "As far as I am concerned, every person in the Knesset warrants respect and I will be careful not to cause offense. I hope they will do the same thing." The 61-year-old Even is a chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University. His previous career in military and civilian national security activities ended when he lost his clearance after coming out. He shared that story with the Knesset almost a decade ago in a successful lobbying effort to reform the military's treatment of gays and lesbians. He and his long-time partner Dr. Amit Kama raised a son together. But another Israeli gay male couple's son will not be legally recognized as their adopted child or as a citizen, as the State Prosecutors Office this week opposed the men's petition in the High Court of Justice. The government brief said the nation "does not recognize a family unit comprised of parents of the same sex." The couple of 13 years' standing hold dual Israeli-American citizenship and adopted the boy from an Asian country while they were living in the U.S. When they decided to return to Israel two years ago, Israel's Interior Ministry rejected their application to register the adoption and grant the boy citizenship. They appealed that rejection to the court with the help of the group New Family, which claims there's no legal grounds for the state's position since "family" is not defined in Israeli law. Some other nations continue to make their definitions of "family" more inclusive. Most remarkably this week, a public vote in the Swiss canton of Zurich supported legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples by a landslide 63%. The referendum was the first of its kind in Switzerland, where only the canton of Geneva has granted legal status to same-gender couples. Zurich's measure is much stronger than Geneva's 2001 "Pacts of Civil Solidarity". Zurich's civil registry will confer status equal to married couples' with respect to taxation, inheritance, social security benefits, hospital visitation, and residency rights for foreign partners in binational relationships. However, the Zurich registry is open only to gay and lesbian couples of at least six months' standing who live in the canton -- and if they move elsewhere, the registration terminates. A joint statement by the Swiss Lesbian Organization, the gay group Pink Cross, and FELS -- Friends and Parents of Lesbians and Gays -- hailed the vote as "historic" and called on the national Government to extend "perfect equality" to same-gender couples. In a move that took many by surprise, the Labor Party Government of the state of Tasmania announced plans to introduce what could become Australia's most comprehensive and progressive laws affecting couples. Tasmanian Attorney-General Judy Jackson said the sweeping reforms would amend more than 120 state laws that "discriminate between married and de facto heterosexual couples on one hand, and same-sex couples and people in significant relationships on the other." Veteran Tasmanian gay civil rights activist Rodney Croome believes the bill has a good chance in the state's Upper House as well as in the Labor-controlled Lower House, where introduction is expected before year's end. The U.S. state of California continues to strengthen the legal standing of its statewide partnership registry. This week Democratic Governor Gray Davis signed into law the nation's first gay-inclusive comprehensive family leave program. It expands state disability insurance to allow up to 6 weeks paid leave to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child, or an ailing family member, including a domestic partner's biological child. Earlier in September Davis signed into law a measure to extend registered domestic partners the same standing as legally married couples to inherit when one partner dies without leaving a will. Chances improved for full equal marriage rights for Swedish gays and lesbians with their success in national elections in mid-September. 5 openly gay men from 5 different parties will now sit in the national parliament, while another 27 open gays and lesbians won local posts. The new MPs include long-time civil rights activists Borje Vestlund of the ruling Social Democratic Party and incumbent Tasso Stafilidis of the Left Party. Sweden's gay and lesbian registered partnerships bring very nearly the same legal rights as traditional marriage, but one of 5 items on the national activist agenda is the ability to marry under the same statutes as heterosexuals -- something now possible only in the Netherlands. India's first transgender "hijra" to win elective office is once again holding her mayoral post in Katni. Elected in January 2000 to a post reserved for women, Kamla Jaan was ousted last month when a court annulled her election on the grounds that she's a biological male. She appealed the ruling, and this week the Madhya Pradesh state high court reinstated her. The saga will continue with further hearings in that court in November. An Egyptian appeals court has overturned the convictions of the so-called "Boulak 4", who had been sentenced to 3 years' imprisonment followed by 3 years' probation for consensual homosexual acts. The Cairo area Boulak Appeals Court of Misdemeanors cited a lack of evidence against the men, including the prosecution's failure to even visit the site of the alleged infraction. International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Program Director Scott Long said, "These men were unjustly arrested, tortured and convicted. We have been waiting more than 10 months to hear this news." But he noted that a retrial is still in progress for 50 men arrested in a police raid on a gay-friendly Nile riverboat nightclub and added that, "We continue to receive reports of new waves of arbitrary arrests." A U.S. federal appeals court for the first time has granted standing to sue for sex discrimination to a gay man harassed by his male co-workers. Previously other U.S. appeals courts had rejected claims of anti-gay discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the federal law which prohibits workplace sex discrimination. But the most liberal of the federal appellate courts, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit, decided 7-to-4 to give Medina Rene his day in court. Rene claims to have experienced near-daily physical sexual harassment from his male co-workers over a period of two years. His former employer, the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, denies those claims, but has not yet decided whether to appeal the current ruling. The finding by the full bench of the 9th Circuit reversed decisions by a trial court and by a divided 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit itself. However , the majority was also divided in the rationale for its decision, falling one vote short of a shared opinion that would have set a binding precedent for all federal courts in 9 Western states. Five justices joined in an opinion written by Justice William Fletcher that Rene's sex discrimination lawsuit should proceed because the harassment against him was specifically "of a sexual nature." Two others who supported his standing cited Title VII's prohibition against discrimination based on gender stereotyping. That theory was acceptable to the minority judges, but they found that Rene had neither made that argument nor presented evidence to support it. The dissenting opinion said that Title VII "is not an anti-harassment statute; it is an anti-discrimination statute against persons in five specific classifications," and denied that the actions against Rene were motivated by his sex. And finally... in German national elections, the ruling "Red-Green" coalition of Social Democrats and Greens that enacted Life Partnerships for gays and lesbians won another four years in power. The closest election since World War II saw the coalition squeak through with a combined vote of just over 47% as the anti-gay Christian Democrats actually took more votes than any other single party. But while the politics were serious business, quite a bit of the campaigning was fun. The gay-supportive Greens used a poster that was based on a 16th-century painting that hangs at the Louvre but showed topless gay and lesbian couples engaged in pinching their partners' nipples. Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, thrice divorced, was hit with the opposition slogan "Three women can't be wrong!" and a film clip of his third ex-wife saying, "I left my husband -- you can do it too!"