NewsWrap for the week ending May 14, 2005 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #894, distributed 5-16-05) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Rex Wockner, and Greg Gordon] Reported this week by Cindy Friedman and Greg Gordon This won't be the year the United Nations Commission on Human Rights declares that gay rights are human rights. The so-called Brazil Resolution identifying discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity as human rights violations has been dropped from the agenda of the current Commission meeting in Geneva, as it has each year since its introduction in 2003. But ILGA, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, takes heart from more countries than ever before calling on the UN to defend the human rights of sexual minorities -- 33. ILGA and other international activists were a visible presence at the Commission meeting, lobbying delegates and making a variety of presentations to highlight the issues. Chilé's parliament, the House of Deputies, has passed a resolution calling for government action on lesbigay and trans civil rights. The national group MOVILH, the Homosexual Integration and Liberation Movement, drafted the text, which urges enactment of a law against discrimination and its vigorous enforcement. It also calls for a stronger response by police and courts to crimes motivated by homophobia. In the Philippines' House of Representatives, a bill to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity won committee approval this week. The same House Committee on Human Rights first greenlighted a similar bill in 2001, but activists are hoping this will be the year for enactment. Companion measures in the Senate have yet to be scheduled for a committee vote. Scotland's Parliament won't listen to anti-gay speeches by religious leaders. Parliamentary leaders adopted a policy two weeks ago against allowing addresses by clergy that attack minorities. They were responding to Roman Catholic Cardinal Keith O'Brien describing lesbigays as "captives to sexual aberration". The Vatican continues to call on Spanish Catholics to take action against their Government's bill to open marriage to gay and lesbian couples -- a bill that's already passed one vote in Parliament. And now the Spanish Bishops Organization has written to King Juan Carlos demanding that he refuse to sign the bill and take a public stand against it. The Spanish monarchy doesn't actually have the power to stop any legislation and by tradition avoids political debate. But Spain's Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero fired back at the Church this week in his State of the Nation address, telling the Parliament, "I will never understand those who proclaim love as the foundation of life, while denying so radically protection, understanding and affection to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our colleagues. What kind of love is this that excludes those who experience their sexuality in a different way?" "I am aware that this measure is one of the most controversial we have approved... [but] we cannot deny a right to many of our compatriots when the exercise of that right does not harm anyone else." Four Muslim imams took more direct action to stop a gay male couple's wedding in Zanzibar -- and they're facing assault charges as a result. The imams burst in during the private ceremony on the island of Pemba and attacked the couple, reportedly beating both into unconsciousness. At last report, the imams had been denied bail and the couple were recuperating. But police are also investigating the possibility of criminal charges against the victims. Last year Zanzibar enacted a law specifically criminalizing same-gender marriages and increasing penalties for homosexual acts, so the couple could potentially face up to 25 years' imprisonment. That's more than the maximum any of their attackers might face. A U.S. federal court this week struck down Nebraska's state constitutional amendment that denies gay and lesbian couples not only marriage but anything remotely resembling it. District Judge Joseph Bataillon is the first federal judge in the nation ever to strike down one of those state marriage amendments that are spreading across the U.S. like wildfire. The Nebraska amendment won its final approval from voters five years ago with a 70% majority. It's one of the broadest in the nation, going well beyond defining marriage as between one man and one woman, to denying legal recognition to same-gender civil unions, domestic partnerships and any "same-sex" relationship "similar to" marriage. That very breadth contributed to its courtroom demise, as the ruling declared it would interfere with "many other legitimate associations, arrangements, contracts, benefits and policies" ... "an almost limitless number of transactions and endeavors" -- and even with "arrangements between potential adoptive or foster parents and children, related persons living together, and people sharing custody of children, as well as gay individuals". The ruling also labeled the amendment "too narrow" -- "too narrow to satisfy its purported purpose of defining marriage, preserving marriage, or fostering procreation and family life" because "it does not address other potential threats to the institution of marriage, such as divorce." But the heart of the decision was that the Nebraska amendment violated lesbigays' constitutional right to equal protection under the law by making it impossible for them to lobby lawmakers "to obtain legal protections for themselves or their children". That, the court found, "impose[d] a broad disability on a single group" -- something the U.S. Supreme Court had already rejected when it struck down a Colorado state amendment barring local governments from extending civil rights protections to gays, lesbians and bisexuals. The upshot is that lesbigays have not won the right to marry or contract domestic partnerships in Nebraska -- they've won the right to try to make those gains through the normal political process. The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda L egal on behalf of the groups Citizens for Equal Protection, Nebraska Advocates for Justice and Equality, and ACLU Nebraska, and their members. The lead defendant is Nebraska's Attorney General Jon Bruning, who has vowed to appeal the decision and vigorously defend the amendment. In the eyes of some of the leading proponents of amending the U.S. national Constitution to restrict marriage to one man and one woman, this week's ruling is more fuel for their fire, as they're confirmed in their belief that no other measure for marriage discrimination will survive the justice system. U.S. activists are also celebrating a few changes to the advice the Bush administration is giving parents via the Department of Health and Human Services Web site. An area designed to help parents speak with their children about sex -- www.4parents.gov -- has had some five million hits in its first month, but what it had to say regarding sexual orientation offended many lesbigays and was sharply criticized by groups including the Human Rights Campaign. The site reflects the administration's promotion of abstinence and denigration of condoms and other contraceptives, and still certainly doesn't treat sexual minority and questioning youth as might P-FLAG, Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays. But at least now the Department has learned that the term "alternative lifestyles" is outdated -- although the word "lifestyle" still appears on the site; it no longer seems to assume that every family of a questioning child automatically requires professional help; and it acknowledges for these children, as it already did for others, the importance of parents expressing their love and acceptance. And finally... scientific research into the biology of sexuality has turned to the sense of smell. In a study published this week in the U.S. journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" a team at Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital tested the responses of heterosexual women, heterosexual men and gay men to two chemicals that might be human pheromones. They're also studying lesbians but say those results are complicated and incomplete, although different from gay men's. Using PET scans -- positron emission tomography -- the researchers were able to examine how subjects' brains responded to smells. Their control scents, including lavender oil, cedar oil and butanol, stimulated only the olfactory region of the brain in all the subjects. The possible pheromones -- an estrogen-related chemical found in female urine called EST and a testosterone derivative found in male sweat called AND -- drew different responses from the heterosexual men than they did from the gay men and the heterosexual women. Along with the olfactory brain response, among the heterosexual men the female EST additionally stimulated a part of the hypothalamus associated with sexual behavior. Neither the heterosexual women nor the gay men showed that hypothalamic response to EST, but they did have a hypothalamic response to the male AND, which the heterosexual men did not. Although this study clearly associates a biological process with sexual orientation, lead researcher Doctor Ivanka Savic cautioned that the Karolinska study does not determine whether the difference it found is a cause or an effect of orientation. It's possible that gay men, in the words of the report, have "an acquired sensitization to AND stimuli in the hypothalamus ... due to repeated sexual exposure to men." The Karolinska team also noted that they were exposing subjects to far higher concentrations of EST and AND than they'd be apt to encounter in real life. But another study has already examined reactions to underarm sweat, the source for AND, and it suggests that "gaydar" may be in the nose. Charles Wysocki and a team at the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia had heterosexual men and women and lesbians and gay men rate their preferences among 24 sweat samples from equally diverse donors. As will be published in the September edition of "Psychological Science", they found that the sweat of gay men was the least preferred by all the subject groups except the gay men -- who liked it best.