NewsWrap
for the week ending June 4, 2005
(As broadcast on This Way Out program #897, distributed 6-6-05)
[Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Rex Wockner, and 
Greg Gordon]


Reported this week by Rick Watts and Cindy Friedman


  Romania saw its first pride march this week in Bucharest.  It had taken a 
massive international protest and the president's personal intervention to 
force the city to issue permits and provide police protection, after the mayor had 
moved to stop the march and the police commissioner had said he'd use his 
force to "punish" the marchers.  Some 500 lesbigays and their allies marched to 
the center of the capital city led by a banner reading "Out and Proud".  About 
two hundred officers policed the march including securing gathering places at 
its beginning and end.  They kept back counter-demonstrators ranging from 
skinheads who shouted abuse, to members of Romania's dominant Orthodox Church who 
sang hymns under a banner reading, "We stand for a clean world without h
omosexuals".  At one point ten or twelve counter-demonstrators charged the line and 
hit police with their signs.  The officers prevailed and detained them until 
the march was over, but not before a smoke bomb had been thrown.  Marchers 
continued through the smoke without disruption.  The march lasted only about 
half-an-hour, ending as a heavy rain began to fall.  Florin Buhuceanu of Romania's 
lesbigay civil rights group ACCEPT, which organized the march, told reporters, 
"We are very happy with our first historic march, which has allowed us to 
show ourselves to the world in broad daylight."


  What's probably this year's biggest crowd for pride gathered this week for 
the 9th annual parade in São Paulo, Brazil.  The throng was estimated at up to 
1,900,000 by police and at 2-1/2-million by the organizers, the Brazilian 
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade Association.  It's believed 
some 700,000 people had traveled from other cities and nations to attend.  The 
total was a new record for Sao Paulo, which last year led the world with a 
crowd of 1-1/2-million for pride.  The first Sao Paulo pride parade in 1997 drew 
only 2,000.  The theme of this year's parade was legal recognition for 
same-gender couples, and activists used the occasion to collect signatures on a 
petition supporting a long-stalled bill in the national legislature.  But a 
Carnaval atmosphere prevailed with big rainbow flags, balloons, costumes, 23 huge 
soundtrucks blaring dance music, and a party that lasted all night.


  Also celebrating its 9th edition of pride this week was Birmingham, 
England.  With more than 100,000 participants, the week-long festival is the city's 
biggest street party and the U.K.'s biggest pridefest that doesn't charge 
admission.  Birmingham Pride kicked off with a parade under sunny skies.


  Elsewhere in the U.K., bishops of the Church of England have been 
considering how to square the church's requirement that priests restrict sexual 
activity to heterosexual marriage with the nation's new law creating civil 
partnerships for same-gender couples beginning in December.  A group including 
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has drafted a proposal for submission to the 
full House of Bishops.  Although the Church of England has been just as 
painfully divided on marriage and ordination of lesbigays as the global Anglican 
Communion it's part of, the national church accepts that its clergy have the legal 
right to contract civil partnerships.  The proposal is for any priests 
planning to register a partnership to first meet with their supervising bishops and 
make a formal promise to abstain from sex.  The proposal does not specify 
disciplinary actions for violations of those vows.  Sex aside, the Church of 
England has already accepted the government's requirements for recognition of civil 
partnerships, including spousal pensions for its employees' partners and even 
a period of continued residence in a vicarage for the partner of a priest who 
dies.  The church's Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement believes some 1,500 
Church of England clergy will be registering civil partnerships.


  "Recognition of civil unions does not represent any threat to the 
institution of marriage and the family.  There is a reality of loving cooperation which 
asks to be granted the dimension of a citizen's right."  Those were the words 
of Italy's first openly gay governor, Puglia's Nichi Vendola, who lives with 
his male partner.  They were published as Vendola had the official duty of 
welcoming the new Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI on his first papal visit to 
Bari, the capital of Puglia.  The new Pope, while still Cardinal Ratzinger, 
called homosexuality a "tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil" and was 
key to organizing the Church's global campaign against legal recognition of 
same-gender couples.  But Vendola also identifies as a Catholic, and he declared 
Benedict's visit to be "a cause of joy for me and for all the people of 
Puglia.  We will welcome Benedict XVI with all the solemnity and joy that this 
important event merits."


  The Canadian Government's bill to open marriage to same-gender couples 
lives on.  Briefly this week it appeared doomed by the clock.  Conservative Party 
Member of Parliament Vic Toews threatened a filibuster if the committee 
reviewing the bill didn't make time for him to call 22 more witnesses to express 
religious concerns, and the Government agreed to extend what had been a condensed 
schedule of hearings by another week.  That would have left just one week for 
both houses to take up the bill before the end of their legislative session 
on June 23rd.  But Liberal Party Prime Minister Paul Martin declared, "There's 
no doubt that ... it's legislation that must pass.  And we want it to pass.  
And parliamentarians are here to do the job."  And that meant even if they have 
to extend their sitting.  The Government's leader in the Senate Jack Austin 
said his house will continue its session well into July if that's what it 
takes.  And although a substantial number of Liberal MPs oppose the bill and 
religious conservatives are lobbying to bring down the Government rather than see it 
enacted, even Toews admits the votes are there for it to pass easily.


  Elsewhere in North America, the Tribal Council of the Navajo Nation voted 
this week by a four-to-one margin to reinstate a bill restricting marriage to 
one man and one woman.  Although the Council had previously adopted this bill 
unanimously, tribal President Joe Shirley had vetoed it as unnecessary and 
divisive.  This week's vote overrode that veto.  Navajo lesbigay groups lobbied 
hard to win the 14 votes opposing the override, and had they won over just four 
more delegates it would have failed.  A dozen Councilmembers abstained.


  Meanwhile the Cherokee Nation's highest court has agreed to take up its 
Tribal Council's challenge to a tribal marriage license that was issued to a 
lesbian couple in Oklahoma a year ago.  Cherokee officials have refused to file 
that license, and later last year the Tribal Council unanimously adopted a 
restrictive one-man-one-woman definition of marriage.


  The California Assembly this week became the first state legislative house 
in the U.S. ever to directly consider a bill to open marriage to same-gender 
couples -- and despite heavy lobbying and procedural maneuvering, the measure 
failed by a handful of votes.  Introduced by openly gay Assemblymember from San 
Francisco Mark Leno and supported by his Democratic Party, the bill would 
have made the state's marriage laws gender-neutral, referring to "a civil 
contract between two persons".  Without support from any of the 33 Republicans in the 
80-member Assembly, it was Democratic dissenters and abstainers who left the 
bill four votes shy of passage.  After extensive consideration, the majority 
Democrats decided not to attempt to bring it to a third vote but to let it die 
with a legislative deadline this week.
Had it passed the Assembly, the bill was essentially certain of passage in 
the Senate where the Democratic majority is larger, although it's not clear how 
Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would've dealt with it.  
As it is, same-gender marriage remains prohibited in California by virtue of 
Proposition 22, a ballot initiative passed by a hefty majority of voters in 
2000.  Nonetheless, the legislature has upgraded California's registered 
partnerships to near-civil union status. Religious conservatives are currently 
working to put a new initiative before the voters for an amendment to the state 
constitution that would represent one of the broadest denials of legal recognition 
to same-gender couples yet seen in the U.S.  Meanwhile, a variety of legal 
cases regarding marriage equality are in progress in California courts.


  And finally... a powerful argument for a genetic contribution to sexual 
orientation has come from that favorite subject of geneticists, the fruit fly.  
In fact the implications of the new study from the Austrian Academy of Sciences 
appearing in the journal "Cell" are much broader, as it's a remarkably clear 
demonstration of a single gene actually determining behavior.  Fruit fly 
mating behavior was already shown to require the correct functioning of a 
particular gene in sixty specific nerve cells.  While flies of both sexes have those 
same nerves, there are male and female variants of the gene in which different 
sites on the gene are typically active or suppressed depending on the fly's 
sex.  The team led by Dr. Barry Dickson genetically modified some flies to give 
some females the male version of that one gene and some males the female 
version.  Given access to another female, the modified female demonstrated the full 
ritual of male courting behaviors -- pursuing her, tapping her on the leg, 
audibly vibrating her own wings, and licking her.  The modified males were 
sexually attentive to other males while behaving more passively.  The researchers 
themselves were surprised at the clarity of the results, and they caution that 
even in fruit flies experience can modify instinctive behaviors to some degree. 
 And of course humans are vastly more complex than fruit flies, though it's 
expected this study will encourage more people to think of sexual orientation 
as biologically based.  And by the way, the name of the gene in question is 
"fru".