NewsWrap for the week ending January 31, 2004 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #827, distributed 2-2-04) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Fenceberry, Rex Wockner, and Greg Gordon] Anchored this week by Cindy Friedman and Christopher Gaal The United Nations announced this week that it will extend family benefits to its gay and lesbian employees whose relationships are legally recognized in their home countries. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan first stated the policy in an internal bulletin last week, and it will go into effect February 1st. He wrote that it would "continue to ensure respect for the social, religious and cultural diversity of the member states and of their nationals." The UN is checking with national delegations as to whether their workers should receive the benefits. Only about a dozen of the 191 member nations are expected to agree. The U.S. will not be one of them, despite some states' recognition of gay and lesbian couples. Any references to gays and lesbians in UN proposals to date have fallen to powerful opposition led by the Vatican and predominantly Muslim nations. Debate will be renewed in March or April as the 53-nation UN Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva considers taking a stand against human rights violations based on sexual orientation. Protection for the human rights of lesbigays and transgenders is advancing in the Philippines as the national House of Representatives approved an Anti-Discrimination Bill last week. The bill would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in areas including education, health services, public accommodations, and employment by private businesses, government and the military. It would also punish harassment by the military or police. Although similar measures have been introduced since 1998, this is the first time one has won passage on the floor of either house. HB6416 was drafted in conjunction with LAGABLAB-Pilipinas, the Lesbian and Gay Legislative Advocacy Network Philippines, and introduced by Akbayan Party Representative Loretta Ann Rosales. The bill has been sent to a committee of the Senate, where gays and lesbians are now actively lobbying for it. The Philippines civil rights bill has already advanced farther than any similar federal measure in the U.S. over three decades, and equal treatment of gays and lesbians took a heavy blow in two courts there this week. Kansas' state Court of Appeals upheld much harsher sentencing for homosexual acts between teenagers than for heterosexual acts. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark June decision in "Lawrence versus Texas" that struck down state sodomy laws, it also vacated the Kansas conviction of Matt Limon and instructed the state appellate court to review the case in light of the ruling. Four years ago, at age 18, Limon had sex with a 14-year-old male. Both were residents at a group home for people with developmental disabilities. In Kansas, all sex acts involving anyone under age 16 are illegal. For consensual heterosexual acts where the older partner is under age 19 and is no more than 4 years older than a 14-to-16-year-old partner, a so-called "Romeo and Juliet" provision applies that caps sentences at 15 months. But that provision explicitly applies only to a couple who "are members of the opposite sex", and because Limon's partner was male, he was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison. Representing Limon, the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the "Lawrence" decision implied a requirement for equal sentencing. But 2 of the 3 state appellate judges interpreted the high court ruling narrowly, finding it did not apply to laws on sex acts with children. They found the state law's discrimination to be justifiable on grounds including greater health risks and, in the words of the ruling, "to prevent the gradual deterioration of the sexual morality approved by a majority of Kansans, it would encourage and preserve the traditional sexual mores of society." The majority believed that freeing males who had sex with teenaged girls would encourage them to marry those girls and to support any children they had fathered -- while there would be no such reason to keep a homosexual partner out of prison. The ACLU will appeal to the Kansas state Supreme Court and if necessary to the U.S. Supreme Court. Limon's attorney Tamara Lange said the nation's highest court "made it very clear that 'traditional sexual mores' are no longer a legitimate rationale for discriminating against gay [and lesbian] people." Dissenting Kansas Judge Joseph Pierron, Junior agreed, writing, "This blatantly discriminatory sentencing provision does not live up to American standards of equal justice." State Attorney-General Phill Kline believes the ruling will also serve to support Kansas' law denying legal marriage to same-gender couples. Also upheld in the face of an ACLU challenge this week was Florida's explicit ban on adoptions by gays, lesbians and bisexuals, currently the only such state law in the nation to apply whether they're single or partnered. This decision could be more widely damaging than the Kansas ruling because it comes from a federal appellate court, a unanimous finding by a 3-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. They wrote, "We exercise great caution when asked to take sides in an ongoing public policy debate, such as the current one over the compatibility of homosexual conduct with the duties of adoptive parenthood. The state of Florida has made the determination that it is not in the best interests of its displaced children to be adopted by individuals who [in the words of the state law] 'engage in current, voluntary homosexual activity' and we have found nothing in the Constitution that forbids this policy judgment. ... The legislature is the proper forum for this debate, and we do not sit as a superlegislature." The state's rationale, echoed by its Governor and the U.S. President's brother Jeb Bush as well as a trial court's earlier ruling in this case, is that it's in the best interests of children to live with a heterosexual couple. Yet more than 3,000 children remain in foster care in Florida. Gays and lesbians both single and partnered are among those providing foster care there -- in fact the parties in the test case are gay men seeking to adopt children they've long fostered. A few Florida judges have even made some same-gender couples permanent legal guardians of children. To the ACLU, these facts discredit the ostensible child welfare motive for the ban, leaving only prejudice to justify it. The ACLU will appeal the ruling, although it has not yet determined whether to seek a rehearing by the full bench of the 11th Circuit or consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. Adoption issues are quite different in gay-friendly European nations where relatively few children are wards of the state. Agence France Presse noted this week that it's been a year since Sweden gave its registered gay and lesbian partners the same status as married couples to adopt unrelated children together. But most adoptions in Sweden are of foreign children, primarily from China, Colombia and South Korea. Sweden's six adoption agencies working with foreign countries have yet to win any nation's agreement to send children to gay and lesbian couples there. On the other hand -- and possibly as a result -- so far only a few same-gender Swedish couples have applied for an international adoption. Belgium, the second nation in the world to open legal marriage to same-gender couples, will make those marriages available to more of those couples on February 6, Expatica.com reports. Until then, Belgian marriages can be performed only between European couples who could legally marry in their home countries, which has effectively restricted gay and lesbian marriages to citizens of Belgium and the Netherlands. But that requirement is about to end, opening Belgian marriages to any same-gender couple of which one or both members at least visits Belgium often, regardless of their home countries' views on the matter. And although some 2,500 gay and lesbian couples have already been married in two provinces of Canada, the wait for a federal marriage equality law there just got significantly longer. While new Prime Minster Paul Martin made his clearest statement yet that his Government "stands behind" legalizing same-gender marriage, that same Government added a further question to the marriage review his predecessor sought from the Supreme Court of Canada. In order to prepare the additional arguments, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler is also asking the high court to delay its hearing on the issue, currently scheduled for April. The upshot is that there's not likely to be a vote in the Parliament until late 2005. Martin denied the move was a delaying tactic, saying the question to the court was important for the Parliamentary debate. The Government is asking the court whether the one-man, one-woman definition of marriage could be retained without violating the national Charter of Rights and Freedoms, since many would prefer to extend equal status under a different name such as civil union. Although the Supreme Court's opinion on the question would not be legally binding, the top provincial courts in Ontario and British Columbia have already found that only equal marriage rights are constitutionally sound. This week the Quebec Court of Appeal heard arguments in a similar lawsuit for marriage equality, although that province already offers gay and lesbian civil unions. And finally... U.S. TV cablecaster Showtime hoped its new lesbian drama "The L Word" would match the success of its "Queer As Folk". Those dreams came true as the first two editions drew four times the channel's average primetime audience. Showtime responded by giving "L Word" the fastest renewal in its history, contracting for a second batch of 13 episodes just 11 days after the series premiere.