NewsWrap for the week ending March 5, 2005 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #884, distributed 3-7-05) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Rex Wockner, and Greg Gordon] Reported this week by Cindy Friedman and Rick Watts West Australian voters appear to have rejected their state's Liberal Party, whose leader Colin Barnett had said he'd work to repeal some of the state's two-year-old equality legislation. When he made those remarks in December, polling indicated he'd easily become the state's next premier, a prediction supported by the national Liberals' gains in Australia's elections. But while the West Australia results could take weeks to be finalized, the state Australian Labor Party appears to still hold more seats in the Legislative Assembly than any other party -- and together with the Greens, they will still outnumber the more conservative Liberals, Nationals and Christian Democrats. The ALP's Geoff Gallop will continue to serve as Premier, as he was when the state passed the landmark legislation that dramatically transformed the legal status of gays and lesbians in West Australia from one of the nation's worst to one of its best. The state vote also returned three openly gay and lesbian lawmakers to the legislature. Barnett had said he'd seek to raise the age of consent for sex between men to 18, compared to 16 for other partners. He wanted to deny same-gender couples both adoptions and access to Family Court to settle property disputes on dissolution. He also planned to deny fertility treatment to all unmarried women. He said these moves were designed to protect the institutions of marriage and family. Even the Liberals' coalition partners the Nationals were not interested in taking up these initiatives, seeing other issues as much higher priorities for the state. In response, the group Gay and Lesbian Equality West Australia, GALEWA, along with other community organizations in the state, mounted a vigorous grassroots campaign against the Liberals. The challenge of resisting a move to undo legal reforms for lesbigay equality is one few communities in the world have yet had to face, but one was also resolved this week in the U.S. city of Topeka, Kansas. It's the home of the peripatetic anti-gay campaigner Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, known for their slogan "God Hates Fags". Topeka's City Council had set out recently to establish civil rights protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Faced with vocal opposition, they ultimately enacted only a non-discrimination policy in the city's own employment policy. But even that was too much for Phelps, who led the petitioning to put a repeal measure before the voters. That initiative would also have repealed the 2002 addition of sexual orientation to the city's hate crimes ordinance, and would have barred the Council from enacting any protections for lesbigay civil rights for the next decade. But this week Topekans rejected the rollback, by a margin of about six percent in unofficial returns. The same ballot featured a primary election for City Council, in which Phelps' granddaughter Jael Phelps fell far short of unseating openly lesbian incumbent Tiffany Muller, who will face a runoff next month. Muller was the first open gay or lesbian to be elected to public office in the state of Kansas and introduced the Topeka civil rights bill. There are no national U.S. civil rights protections for lesbigays, and this week the federal House of Representatives passed a bill that the opposition Democrats charge features government-sanctioned discrimination. The Workforce Investment Act has long funded job training programs, but the latest edition for the first time allows any church groups that run those programs to discriminate on religious grounds in the hiring of program personnel. That provision is designed to sidestep state and local protections from employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Republican President George W. Bush called for similar language to be inserted in other federal grants programs as well. House passage came by a margin of about five percent, with Republican supporters including a dozen Congressmembers who'd received campaign endorsements and support from lesbigay organizations. One of them was the lone openly gay Republican federal lawmaker, Arizona's Jim Kolbe. The bill moves next to the Senate. Meanwhile, U.S. state legislatures continue to advance state constitutional amendments to deny marriage to same-gender couples. South Dakota voters will see one such proposed amendment on their ballots in November 2006, following a Senate vote this week. Less than 60% of the Senate supported the move, compared to 80% support in an earlier House vote. The governor's approval was not required under the South Dakota system. The hurdles are a little higher in Virginia, where the proposed amendment's appearance on the November 2006 ballot will require both houses to approve their amendment again next year. But it passed its first round this week with approval of identical wording by both more than 80% of the House and 75% of the Senate. South Carolina's proposed amendment has yet to reach the Senate, but House approval this week came by well over 90%. Indiana's proposed amendment has yet to reach the House, but about 85% of the Senate supported it in a late February vote. But there've been some U.S. state moves favorable to same-gender couples as well. The Montana Senate this week passed a bill to create a state registry where individuals can designate whomever they please as next-of-kin for purposes of hospital visitation, medical decision-making in event of incapacitation, and custody of remains after death. Although this bill would aid many non-gays, the opposition to it was primarily homophobic. That could dim its prospects in the House, which in late February defeated a bill to add sexual orientation as a protected category under the hate crimes law. And there was an advance even in Virginia, which is the only U.S. state that bars private as well as public employers from extending spousal health benefits to their unmarried employees' domestic partners. In late February the House approved repeal of that stricture on private businesses by a one-vote margin. The Senate had already given it nearly two-thirds support, and the Democratic Governor, Mark Warner, has said he'll sign it. Hungary's Government announced this week that it's developing legislation to create registered domestic partnerships for same-gender couples. Those partnerships would carry most of the benefits of marriage in areas including social security benefits, property and inheritance, but would exclude adoptions. The Justice Department plans to publish its proposed changes to the Civil Code in 2006 and to introduce them in the parliament in 2007. Sweden may soon eliminate one of the few differences between its gay and lesbian registered partnerships and heterosexual marriage. Currently fertility treatments are limited to women with male spouses or cohabitants. But unnamed sources in the Swedish Government were reported this week as revealing plans to give lesbians in registered partnerships equal access to those treatments, including parental status for the partner not bearing the child. Swedish public radio Ekot said the ruling Social Democrats had already agreed on the move among themselves and with the Left and Green Parties, and expected the change to go into effect in July. But New Zealand's new civil unions remain controversial, with an estimated 15,000 opponents marching in protest this week in Auckland. Some 30 gay-supportive counter-demonstrators tried to block them by sitting in the road only to be moved aside by police as the march began. About 200 counter-demonstrators had various altercations with marchers along the way but there was no reported violence or arrests. The anti-gay Destiny Church organized the protest, which ended in a rally at a park. That was briefly disrupted by two women who ran onto the platform and kissed before the crowd before organizers removed them. Originally the march was planned to cross Auckland's Harbour Bridge, but official permission was twice denied on safety grounds. It was lesbigay-trans pride that took to the streets elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere this week. In South Africa, hundreds marched in Cape Town's annual pride parade before a crowd organizers called the largest ever. Mayor Nomainda Mfeketo gave a send-off speech. The parade with its floats, costumes and after-party climaxed Cape Town's ten-day pride festival. And finally... in Australia, an estimated 450,000 people lined the streets to watch the 130 floats and some 6,000 marchers of the 28th Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade. This year's theme was "Our Freedom, Your Freedom" and featured marchers with the flags of the more than 80 nations that criminalize homosexual acts. Naturally marriage was much represented, with couples ranging from Prince Charles and Camilla to Prime Minister John Howard and U.S. President Bush. Howard also appeared as the head of a giant snake on a float entitled, "Adam and Steve, Ada and Eve and the Garden of Freedom". That float was accompanied by dancers in fig leaves carrying oversize prop apples. The grand marshals were the lesbian family whose appearance on a children's TV show caused great hoopla last year -- 8-year-old Brenna Harding and her "two mums" Vicki and Jackie. Brenna and Vicki Harding are also authors of a children's book called "The Rainbow Cubby" about children of gay and lesbian couples, and gay-supportive MP Tanya Plibersek celebrated the pride festival this week by reading that book to Year 3 students at a local school with reporters looking on. The "Sydney Star Observer" reports that after the reading, Plibersek asked the class what they thought would happen next. Shockingly, one boy responded with glee, "They're all going to die!" But it turned out that wasn't about homophobia at all, but because of a comic moment in the book -- when, in the boy's words, "They ate potatoes that had dogs' spit on them."