NewsWrap for the week ending June 26, 2004 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #848, distributed 6-28-04) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Fenceberry, Rex Wockner, and Greg Gordon] Anchored this week by Christopher Gaal and Cindy Friedman New Zealand's Parliament this week gave initial approval to the Labour Government's bill to create registered partnerships open to both same-gender and heterosexual couples. After two hours of passionate debate, the Civil Union Bill passed its first reading with a 57% majority as parties allowed their Members a free vote. While MPs from Labour and three other Opposition parties were split on the issue to varying degrees, Labour's conservative coalition partner United Future unanimously opposed it and the Greens unanimously supported it. It will next be taken up by the Justice Committee, which will consider input from the public. Opponents denounced civil unions as social engineering, warned they would undermine marriage, and expressed concern that gay male couples would be able to adopt children. Non-gay supporters denied there would be any negative impact on their own marriages and called the bill a matter of equality. Three openly sexual minority Labour MPs -- transwoman Georgina Beyer and gays Tim Barnett and Chris Carter -- spoke in support of the bill. Carter, New Zealand's first openly gay Cabinet minister, was particularly eloquent in describing his 31-year partnership with Peter Kaiser and their joint rearing of their 3 children as being like any marriage except for their gender. While the Civil Union Bill would generally extend legal status equal to marriage, its real teeth are in a companion measure, the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill. That will amend about 100 laws and about 1,000 regulations to remove any discrimination against unmarried couples. Although its impact will be very broad, New Zealand's Marriage Act will remain as is, restricting marriage per se to heterosexual couples. Debate on the Relationships Bill began this week and will continue in the coming week. The Government hopes to see both bills enacted by the end of this year. But Britain's House of Lords this week amended the Labour Government's Civil Partnerships Bill and may have succeeded in "wrecking" it in the report stage. The bill itself would create registered partnerships for same-gender couples carrying many of the legal rights and responsibilities of marriage, in areas including next-of-kin status in medical affairs and deaths, pension rights, and inheritance rights including tax benefits. But bishops, Conservative Party peers and independents joined to provide a 53% edge to pass the so-called "spinster sisters amendment" introduced by Tory Baroness O'Cathain. That would open the partnerships originally proposed exclusively for gay and lesbian couples to adult relatives who live together -- specifically, to cohabitants of at least 12 years' standing who cannot legally marry and are at least 30 years old. The biggest problem is that as blood relatives they already have a legally defined relationship. As Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland argued for the Government, relatives could for example use a civil partnership to evade inheritance taxes on large estates, and even laws against incest might be blurred, as the whole nature of the family unit could be thrown into question. The Solicitor's Family Law Association had previously asserted that broadening the civil partnerships beyond gay and lesbian couples would "render [the law] unworkable in the broader context of family law." Those who supported the amendment denounced the Government's original proposal as discriminatory, and called for the benefits of partnership to be available to those who had made sacrifices to serve as care-givers for their elderly relatives. In arguing for it, independent Lord Maginnis described same-gender couples as "indulg[ing] in ... unnatural sexual practices." Openly gay Lord Alli called it "a figleaf" for opponents, declaring that, "This amendment is ill-conceived and does nothing other than undermine the purpose of the bill." The amendment has certainly thrown the future of the bill into doubt. Baroness Scotland said the amendment in effect defeated the Civil Partnerships Bill and that the Government would neither move its own further amendments nor debate any more proposed by the Opposition in the House of Lords. Labour whip Lord Grocott declared the bill should be sent to the House of Commons as soon as possible. There Labour's large majority can be expected to remove the amendment. But since the bill was originally introduced in the Lords, the Government cannot invoke the Parliament Acts to override the upper house. Yet Britain's Law Lords, the nation's highest judicial authority, this week affirmed by 4-to-1 a gay man's right to inherit tenancy from his domestic partner of almost 20 years. Unmarried heterosexual partners have this right. At issue was the phrasing of the Rent Act referring to living "as his or her wife or husband". To the majority, there was "no rational ground" to exclude same-gender couples, particularly since Britain's adoption of the Human Rights Act assuring their equal treatment under the European Convention on Human Rights. To dissenter Lord Millett, it was "unmistakably implicit" that the Rent Act was intended to apply only to heterosexual couples, since they were required not only to live together but to do so as husband and wife. The men's landlord was appealing a Court of Appeals decision two years ago in the tenant's favor. Had he been able to evict the surviving tenant, the landlord could have significantly raised the rent on their unit. The ruling is not only a victory for Antonio Mendoza, whose partner Hugh Wallwyn-James succumbed to cancer in 2001, but a landmark in legal recognition for Britain's same-gender couples. Lady Hale's ruling called equal treatment for gays and lesbians "essential to democracy," and declared that, "Homosexual relationships can have exactly the same qualities of intimacy, stability and interdependence that heterosexual relationships do." Australia's Government bill to deny legal recognition to marriages and adoptions by gay and lesbian couples was this week sent by the Senate to its legal committee, for a full-scale investigation of its possible constitutional and international issues, its consequences if enacted, and how same-gender couples might be legally recognized. That inquiry is also planned to review the Government's demand that the bill be fast-tracked, when the Senate did not see evidence of its urgency. But the Coalition Government is so eager for action that it responded by immediately introducing another bill against same-gender marriage in the House of Representatives and declaring it a matter of urgency. And although the largest Opposition group, the Australian Labor Party, denounced the move as bad procedure, it once again voted along with the Government to send the second bill to the Senate. Only Green Member of Parliament Michael Organ criticized the bill itself on the lower house floor, unsuccessfully attempting to amend it to legalize same-gender marriages and recognize those contracted overseas. But the Coalition lacks the numbers to dominate the Senate as it does the House. ALP Senators joined with the Australian Democrats, the Greens and two independents to take the unusual step of rejecting the Government's second bill at its first reading, killing it. The Senate committee will report on the Government's original bill in October. Meanwhile, the Australian Government's long-delayed pension reform package passed, and as promised it will make it possible for same-gender partners to access benefits and to do so without tax penalties as heterosexual couples do. The Government dropped its long-time opposition to including gay and lesbian partners in this way only when it began its campaign against their marrying and adopting, and it still firmly insisted on wording its bill in a way that avoided any specific or de facto recognition of them. So, the superannuation bill defines "interdependency relationships" that can include non-family members if they "have a close personal relationship"; live together; and "one or each of them provides the other with financial support ... and domestic care." Yet openly gay Australian Democratic Senator Brian Greig noted that the Government had no such reticence about referring to gay and lesbian couples in another bill introduced this week. For the first time ever, the definition of a "close family member of a person" includes "the person's same-sex partner" in just those words ... in the Government's latest Anti-Terrorism Bill. One of the world's longest-serving openly gay national lawmakers, Canada's Svend Robinson, was formally charged with theft this week for his admitted shoplifting of a ring in April. A few days after the act, Robinson attributed his lapse to stress and announced both a medical leave from his seat in Parliament and withdrawal of his candidacy for re-election. He'd served 25 years in the Commons as a New Democratic Party Member for a Vancouver-area riding, and publicly identified himself as a gay man in the mid-1980s. Robinson had turned himself in to police and confessed to them, and his cooperation and remorse make it unlikely he'll face anything like the maximum possible sentence of ten years' imprisonment. But any conviction could be damaging to his future standing as an attorney and limiting to his international travel options. And finally... Britain's openly gay animal health minister Ben Bradshaw was the unintentional cause of widespread laughter throughout the House of Commons this week when he declared that, "I understand that Slovenia and Greece ... produce very fine queens." But as all of those giggling well understood, Bradshaw was offering European Union alternatives for one MP with a constituent who is bugged at being barred from importing queens from the U.S. state of Hawai'i... for his beehives.