NewsWrap for the week ending November 1, 2003 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #814, distributed 11-3-03) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Fenceberry, Rex Wockner, and Greg Gordon] Anchored by Jon Beaupré and Cindy Friedman In what's believed to be the first pride parade in the Chinese world, perhaps 1,000 Taiwanese lesbigays and their allies marched through Taipei this week. More than 50 units followed a 20-meter-long rainbow flag from a park widely associated with gays to the city's commercial center. As Mayor Ma Ying-jeou noted in addressing the rally, the city has contributed funds to the annual Taipei Gay Carnival since its 1999 inception. He said, "We do this because there are 290,000 homosexuals in Taipei and we want them to be treated equally like heterosexuals. I want to tell our homosexual friends -- if you live in Taipei, you won't be discriminated against." March organizers the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline called their event the Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Movement, and they want sexual orientation discrimination to be prohibited by law. At least one organizer is somewhat skeptical of the fate of the Taiwan Government's proposed legal recognition of same-gender couples. A Cabinet spokesperson reaffirmed this week that a draft is underway and should be ready for Parliamentary review in December, as part of the Basic Human Rights Bill. To date, no country in Asia has recognized gay and lesbian couples. Pride issues are a little different in the English-speaking nations -- it comes down to money. Auckland's venerable HERO Festival organizers happily announced this week that they've cleared the debt of 140,000 New Zealand dollars that's handcuffed the festival's charitable trust for two years. Creditors have all agreed to accept partial payment and many actually donated that payment back to HERO. That frees organizers legally to get to work on the festival for this coming February. Vancouver Pride Society leaders told their annual general meeting last week that about three-fourths of the debt of 106,000 Canadian dollars they began the year with has been paid off, and that money owed to the group will cover the rest once it's received, the magazine "Xtra West" has reported. Internal accounting had been such a mess that the Society board had asked authorities to examine the group's 2002 finances. Police found insufficient evidence to pursue an investigation, while a British Columbia provincial agency continues its audit. But while those groups have struggled out of their financial quagmires, Lo ndon's Mardi Gras shareholders decided at their general meeting to go into voluntary liquidation, Rainbow Network reported. This group had staged London's Pride festival since their predecessors went under in 1999. Without grants, the gap between production costs and income from tickets grew bigger each year, and this year attendance was hampered by bad weather. It wasn't money but a legal issue that nixed Australia's 2004 National Lesbian Festival and Conference, planned for January in Daylesford. The event won some national attention when a trial court greenlighted organizers' plan to restrict attendance to what they called "Lesbians Born Female" -- that is, to exclude transwomen -- with an exemption from Victoria's state equal opportunity laws. But after transwomen of the group Australian WOMAN Network, offended by the term "female-born," won a reversal on appeal, organizers called off the event for the coming year... while vowing to try again. In Australia's national Senate this week, the Coalition Government's massive pension reform bill was finally approved, but without recognition of gay and lesbian partners. For the first time, the Australian Labor Party joined in support of recognizing same-gender couples with the Greens and the Australian Democrats, after the Democrats resolved an internal division on the issue. But four independent Senators opposed their amendments to swing the vote the Government's way. Labor is only willing to go so far, though; its legal affairs spokesperson Robert McLelland told a gathering of the party's lesbigay group Rainbow Labor that it might consider a partnership registry but not legal marriage for same-gender couples. Also this week, a Defence Department spokesperson reaffirmed that newly-expanded benefits for partners of members of the Australian Defence Force are not available to the same-gender partners of gay and lesbian servicemembers. While this was said to be in line with the way the Government defines "de facto" and "married" couples, the Government could include same-gender couples if it wished -- and indeed was encouraged to do so by the Human Rights Commission early this year. Britain's Government this week introduced its move to add sexual orientation as a category protected under the nation's hate crimes law. The amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill would also add disability to the current categories of race and religion, whose use in targeting victims can lead to harsher sentences for perpetrators. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has released its annual hate crimes report, including more than 1,200 homophobic incidents involving more than 1,500 victims. Reporting of hate crimes from local agencies to the FBI remains spotty, with only 15% of participating local agencies reporting any hate crimes whatsoever in 2002. Significantly more anti-gay cases are identified by the non-profit National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, from victim and news reports in just some parts of the country. This led to renewed calls for the addition of sexual orientation as a category protected under federal hate crimes laws, and not just the Hate Crimes Statistics Act signed by the first President Bush 12 years ago. But even with the chronic undercounting, the FBI still pegged anti-gay attacks at their highest percentage yet of all reported hate crimes, 16.7%, third behind racial and religious attacks. The city of Casper, Wyoming is doing what it can to stop the latest campaign by peripatetic professional homophobe Fred "Godhatesfags" Phelps. October marked the 5th anniversary of the death of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, the world's most famous gay-bashing victim. Phelps and his Topeka, Kansas Westboro Baptist Church -- whose members are mostly his family -- declared their intention to erect a $15,000 6-foot granite memorial to Shepard in a city park in Casper, his hometown. Its engraved plaque with a portrait of Shepard would read, "Matthew Shepard entered hell October 12, 1998 at age 21 in defiance of God's warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' --Leviticus 18:22." In fact Phelps declared he would "pockmark" the nation with identical monuments, having seized on a federal appeals court decision that if a city displays the Ten Commandments on public property, it must allow other religious displays. Casper has a Ten Commandments monument, a gift from the Fraternal Order of Eagles. This week the Casper City Council held a special meeting to respond to Phelps. The Council unanimously rejected his monument plan, as did all of the citizens who offered a total of four hours of testimony and another 50 who demonstrated outside. Then, while 4 Councilmembers voted to remove the Ten Commandments display from public land, a majority of 5 voted to move it to a new plaza designated as an historical monument to the development of American law. A similar plaza in Colorado withstood a legal challenge to its inclusion of the Ten Commandments. Casper's move may or may not sidestep a legal battle with the tireless litigators among the Phelps clan, but either way it probably won't stop the monument. Phelps has said that if he can't put it in the city park, he'll buy private property in Casper for it. Meanwhile, he's already aiming at his second target, the town of Rupert, Idaho, where he's asking to buy a piece of the courthouse lawn for his monument. An American Legion chapter there has already been trying to buy a place on that lawn for a Ten Commandments display, but it's not yet clear if they can do so. At this point it's uncertain even whether it's the city of Rupert or Minidoka County that actually owns the lawn. The Arizona state Supreme Court this week rejected a challenge to a gubernatorial order prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination and harassment in state employment. Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano's June order applies only to the executive branch of state government. In July, a half-dozen Republican state legislators with the help of the religious right legal group All iance Defense Fund directly petitioned the state's highest court to block it. They argued that only the state legislature could set civil rights standards, and pointed to its 2001 rejection of much broader protections for gays and lesbians. The justices did not comment in declining to take the case, so it's not clear how they might ultimately decide if the plaintiffs take it to trial court. And finally... a U.K. reality TV show has run into reality of another kind. Viewers won't be seeing "There's Something About Miriam," a new show from "Big Brother" and "Fear Factor" producers Endemol, that had been planned to air in November on SkyOne. The apparently ordinary set-up was that a half-dozen male contestants would vie for the affections of "Miriam," described by the producers' spokesperson as "a gorgeous creature." And woo they did, some going so far as kisses in their quest for a 10,000-pound prize. But this week all six men lawyered up to stop the broadcast and any mention of their names, claiming breach of contract, personal injury, defamation, and conspiracy to commit a sexual assault. They'd responded to recruiting ads for "the adventure of a lifetime" as men who "want it all" and are "fit and up for everything." But they'd signed releases only before confronting the show's surprise twist -- that Miriam is a pre-op transsexual. Producers insist they took care never to refer to Miriam as female, but in the face of the threatened lawsuit the show's been shelved. It now seems ironic that the project's working title was "Find Me A Man".