REMINDER: There will be no "NewsWrap" segment on "This Way Out" program #770 (week of 12/30/02). Our traditionally tuneful "AudioFile Year In Review" will fill all of that program. ---------------------------------------------------------------- NewsWrap for the week ending December 14, 2002 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #768, distributed 12-16-02) [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 Buenos Aires has become the first city in Latin America to extend legal recognition to same-gender couples, with a city council vote this week. By a nearly 3-to-1 margin, lawmakers approved creation of a partnership registry for gays and lesbians that grants them hospital visitation rights. The registered partners of Buenos Aires' civil servants will receive full spousal benefits including health care, insurance and pensions. Passage came only after extensive debate as the measure was hotly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, the dominant religious group in Argentina. The Government of the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island this week introduced the first in a planned series of bills to equalize the legal standing of gay and lesbian and unmarried heterosexual couples with that of legally married spouses. PEI law has not yet recognized same-gender couples in any way. The current bill would amend the provincial Family Law Act to establish equal rights when couples break up, by adding to the term "spouse" the phrase "or common-law partner" and changing the definition of common-law partnerships from "a man and a woman" to "two persons". It covers areas including child custody, property division and support payments. Couples gain legal standing after three years' cohabitation or when they bear or adopt a child together. Attorney General Jeff Lantz says that about 40 other provincial laws need similar changes to comply with an earlier ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada, but that legislation won't be introduced for a few months. The Government of the Australian Capital Territory is currently seeking public input on its plans to extend legal recognition to same-gender couples, but this week it introduced a bill to clean up the language of 37 territorial laws that discriminate against lesbians, gays and transgenders. Chief Minister Jon Stanhope of the ACT's ruling Australian Labor Party said, "Everyone is entitled to respect, dignity and the right to participate in society and to receive the protection of the law regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity." He also introduced the discussion paper on issues including how to legally recognize same-gender couples and their parental status, the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to territorial anti-vilification laws, and the recognition of transgender and intersexed people's self-identified gender. The Government will report the results to the ACT legislature in May. Transsexuals in Britain will finally get the right to obtain amended birth certificates and so to legally marry in their post-surgical gender, the Labour Government announced this week. These are moves Britain has long resisted, leaving it the only European country except for Albania, Andorra and Ireland to deny transsexuals revised birth certificates. The change is forced by a July ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. The Government stated its position this week because a transsexual's lawsuit seeking legal recognition of her marriage is pending before the Law Lords. A bill won't be introduced for a few months and probably won't go into effect until 2004. South Korea's best-known transsexual, the popular singer/actress/model known as Ha Ri-su, this week won legal recognition of her post-surgical gender. The Inchon District Court granted her a change of the official family register -- Korea's basic legal identification -- to show her as a female named "Lee Kyong-eun" instead of a male named "Lee Kyong-yop". The court ruling cited her constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness and said, "Considering that Ha has been socially recognized as female after her transgender operation, it is appropriate that we regard Ha physically as a woman." Ha is believed to be only the second Korean transsexual to win a legal identity change, the first having been decided in July. Ha can now legally realize her dream of marrying a male. A Swedish appellate court this week upheld a ruling that a lesbian's sperm donor is responsible for paying support for her three children. Although Sweden does not provide artificial insemination for lesbians, biological mother Anna Bjurling and her former lesbian partner had made private arrangements with donor Igor Lehnberg with the understanding that the women would raise the children. When Bjurling and her partner broke up last year, she sued Lehnberg for child support and won in a lower court. In the U.S., two respected professional bodies have come out in support of gay and lesbian families. The Board of Trustees of the 37,000-member American Psychiatric Association last week approved a position statement saying the group "supports initiatives which allow same-sex couples to adopt and co-parent children and supports all the associated legal rights, benefits and responsibilities which arise from such initiatives." Similar statements of support for gay and lesbian parents were issued earlier this year by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Association of Family Physicians. And the influential American Law Institute after ten years of study has published a report recommending that sexual orientation should not be a legal consideration in custody matters, that "de facto parents" should have standing to sue for custody and visitation, and that long-term same-gender couples should be liable for alimony and child support payments on dissolution. Two U.S. cities this week acted for same-gender couples. While many municipalities across the U.S. have extended spousal health care benefits to the same-gender partners of their civil servants, there's special significance to their adoption this week by the City Council of Colorado Springs, Colorado. That's where the anti-gay religious right media giant Focus on the Family has its headquarters, and it was once home to the sponsoring group of the notorious 1992 statewide ballot initiative Amendment 2. That move to bar local governments from recognizing lesbians, bisexuals and gays as a minority group won a large majority of citizens' votes but was never enforced, blocked by a series of legal actions until the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in a landmark ruling. The partner benefits passed the city council by a one-vote margin. The Minneapolis, Minnesota City Council took a much more unusual step this week, voting by a 2-to-1 margin to require that all companies contracting with the city for more than $100,000 extend the same benefits to their employees' domestic partners as they do to legally married spouses. The equal benefits ordinance was originally proposed specifically for gay and l esbian couples but before passage was extended to include heterosexual cohabitants as well. Religious groups contracting with Minneapolis are exempt. U.S. President George W. Bush this week issued an executive order to end what he calls discrimination against religious groups in the issuance of federal contracts and grants. Although the legislative version of his so-called faith-based or charitable choice initiative passed quickly through the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, it's been blocked for two years in the Senate, in large part because it would have exempted religious groups from state and local civil rights laws in the execution of their federal contracts. The executive order does not go that far and does specify that all clients must be accepted for federally-funded services, but it allows religious contractors to discriminate in accord with their beliefs in the employment of staff to provide those services. Massachusetts Democrats Senator Ted Kennedy and openly gay Congressmember Barney Frank view this as using taxpayer funds to support discrimination, as do groups including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Stonewall Democrats and the gay-supportive group People for the American Way. But Mark Mead, political director of the gay and lesbian Log Cabin Republicans, told the Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network that "It's the same old end-of-the-world crap we heard 2 years ago when Bush was elected. The left energizes its constituency the same way the religious right does -- by fear." Meanwhile, a U.S. federal appellate court dismissed a religious challenge to ordinances in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky that prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. A lower court had already rejected Baptist physician Barrett Hyman's claims under the U.S. and Kentucky constitutions since being prevented from discriminating as an employer did not interfere with his religious practice. The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found he had no standing to sue since he had no "immediate or projected need" to hire nor -- as a well-known homophobe -- "any real expectation that he would have any homosexual applicants for employment in the future"... and therefore could not show he was being harmed or was very likely to be. Hyman's lawsuit was brought by the Pat Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice, and it's not yet known if there will be a further appeal. And finally... started 25 years ago as a protest demanding gay and lesbian equality, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras will be dropping the "g" and "l" words from its name in 2003. That's the decision of the board of directors of the organizing group New Mardi Gras, established after the 2002 parade's financial disaster sank the previous organizing group. New Mardi Gras co-chair Michael Woodhouse called the name change a move towards inclusion of those who use other labels for their sexuality and of allies such as relatives of gays and lesbians. He told the "Sydney Star Observer" that the parade "speaks for itself," that "The real power of it is actually the people who make the parade what it is. And that's pretty universally recognized as being an event that is about gay men, lesbians, bisexual, transgender and queer people. In that sense, the name was probably not the most important thing to convey that information." Inevitably, many in the community disagree. Postings to SSO's Web site included one noting the new group had paid a substantial amount to purchase the rights to the old name from the bankrupt group. Another, given the recent growth of corporate sponsorship, asked how long it would be until it became "The Telstra Mardi Gras" and concluded that, "At the rate we are going now, homosexuality will just vanish from Sydney by 2005." Well, on that score it's probably safe to say "no worries, mate!"