NewsWrap for the week ending October 29, 2005 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #918, distributed 10-31-05) [Written this week by Jon Beaupré, Lucia Chappelle, and Greg Gordon, with thanks to Cindy Friedman, Graham Underhill, and Rex Wockner] Reported this week by Jon Beaupré and Greg Gordon   Polish gays and lesbians must be on edge following the election in mid-October of homophobic Warsaw mayor Lech Kaczynski as the country's new President.  In June, Kaczynski defiantly refused to grant the permit for a Pride parade in his city.  More than 2,500 people marched anyway, and were pelted with eggs and stones by angry onlookers. Then last month Kaczynski's ultra conservative Law and Justice Party won control of the nation's Parliament. Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, nominated by the Law and Justice party to lead the next government as Prime Minister, has also made his homophobia crystal clear.  In the Polish edition of Newsweek magazine Marcinkiewicz called homosexuality "unnatural," saying, "If such a person tries to infect others with their homosexuality, then the state has to intervene in such an abuse of freedom." The European Union this week issued an explicit warning to Poland's new President about protecting the rights of gays and lesbians.  In a sternly worded letter, the European Commission expressed concern about Kaczynski's well-known record of homophobia and said Poland must comply with the Union's lesbigay-inclusive anti-discrimination regulations. The letter reminded Kaczynski that all member states must abide by those edicts, and warned that the E.U. would invoke the Treaty of Nice, which strips member states of their voting rights, if Poland violates the European Union's constitution.   Two men appeared at a South London magistrates court this week in connection with the death of 24-year-old Jody Dobrowski, who was brutally attacked in the early morning hours of October 15th. Dobrowski suffered a violent, disfiguring attack in Clapham Common that left him unconscious.  He was found by a passerby and died about two hours later in a local hospital.  Law enforcement officials mounted a very visible campaign to catch Dobrowski's killers, and acknowledged early on that the attack was motivated by homophobia and would be treated as a hate crime. The two men in custody were identified by authorities as 25 year old Thomas Pickford and 33 year old Scott Walker, both of whom are homeless.  Scotland Yard said the two men were arrested a week after the killing. They spoke in court only to confirm their identities.  Their lawyers made no application for bail, so they will remain in custody.  Walker and Pickford are scheduled to appear at the Old Bailey court at the end of January to face charges.   In more queer-positive European news, Sweden's civil partnerships will soon be eligible to be solemnized in the nation's largest Protestant denomination. The Church Assembly of the Swedish Lutheran Church decided this week to develop a system to offer special blessing ceremonies to same-gender couples who have signed a legal partnership agreement.  160 members of the Church's governing body voted in favor of the proposal, with 81 voting against and 8 abstentions.  The blessing ceremonies are expected to be instituted by 2006.  Individual ministers won't be forced to officiate, but every congregation will be held responsible for recruiting willing clergy if necessary to make the ceremonies available. The Swedish government has also moved to expand the availability of partnership ceremonies.  Under planned revisions to the civil partnership law, civil registrars who refuse to perform same-gender ceremonies would lose their licenses.  Swedish civil partners have virtually the same rights and responsibilities as married couples, so much so that a government committee is considering whether to eliminate the distinction and make the current marriage law "gender neutral."   Meanwhile, an overwhelming number of participants at the annual meeting of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut would like to follow the Swedish Lutherans' lead.  A resolution was passed there urging that priests be allowed to preside at the state's new same-gender civil unions.  Bishop Andrew Smith called the motion's passage "a sense of this convention at this time," but cautioned that it did not give priests the authority to perform the unions.  Smith said the matter would be discussed further, and that nothing could actually change until the House of Bishops meeting in 2006.   Alaska's Supreme Court ruled unanimously this week that refusing to grant domestic partner benefits to gay and lesbian public workers violates the state constitution's equal protection clause. The case began in 1999, soon after Alaska voters became one of the nation's first to approve a state constitutional amendment banning legal recognition of same gender marriages.  Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, nine lesbian or gay state and municipal employees or retirees filed a lawsuit against the state and the Municipality of Anchorage seeking the domestic partner benefits state policy denies them.  The lawsuit noted that their partners were prevented from sharing the health, pension and insurance benefits which heterosexual couples receive. The state had argued that denying gay and lesbian employees domestic partner benefits furthered its interest in promoting marriage.  A lower court ruled that the state and city did not have to extend benefits, reasoning that unmarried heterosexual couples are also not eligible.  But this week's state high court ruling rejected that logic, noting that heterosexual couples can choose to get married, while same gender couples cannot, and that "denying benefits to the same-sex domestic partners who are absolutely ineligible to become spouses has no demonstrated relationship to the interest of promoting marriage." Anchorage city officials said they would not appeal the ruling, but Alaska's Republican Governor Frank Murkowski is "outraged" by it, according to his spokesperson Betty Hultberg.  She told reporters that Murkowski has ordered the state Attorney General's office to find ways to overturn it.   The withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court appears to be another serious blow to an already reeling Bush Administration.  Some critics say it's proof-positive of the White House's over-dependence on the extreme religious-right.  As conservative Republican opposition to the judicially inexperienced Miers grew, the news that the President's top aides had tried to assure Christian conservatives that their boss's long-time attorney would overturn reproductive freedoms and block GLBT civil rights only eroded support for the confirmation campaign even more. With Miers out of contention, the presumed short-list of replacements for the moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor includes several judges with conservative, anti-gay and lesbian track records, such as Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen, each of whom won federal bench appointments after bitter Senate battles.  Meanwhile, Justice O'Connor continues to participate in Supreme Court deliberations on pivotal cases involving key constitutional issues.  The Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on lesbian and gay servicemembers is the subject of a case to be argued on December 6th.   And finally, there were not one but two highly visible coming out stories in the U.S. this week.  Women’s basketball star Sheryl Swoopes, of the Houston Comets, told ESPN Magazine that she is a lesbian, making her the first African-American basketball player to come out. Swoopes is one of the most popular and fiercest competitors in the Women’s National Basketball Association.  She's won three Olympic gold medals, and is a five-time WNBA All-Star.  Swoopes leads the league in Most Valuable Player titles.  She's been the leading vote-getter in All-Star Game balloting five of the six years it's been held, and was crowned this year's All-Star MVP.  She's played for the Comets since 1997, and was one of the first players signed by the WNBA when the league was formed in 1996. In the ESPN Magazine article and subsequent interviews, Swoopes also acknowledged her partner, former Comets assistant coach Alisa Scott, who resigned her post in January, reportedly due to the conflict of interest presented by her relationship with Swoopes.  Their seven years together has apparently been an open secret in the WNBA.  With Scott, Swoopes is raising her 8-year-old son from an earlier marriage. "I was at a point in my life where I am just tired of having to pretend to be somebody I am not," Swoopes told the New York Times. "I was basically living a lie. For the last seven, eight years, I was waiting to exhale."   Also this week, George Takei, best known for his role as Mr. Sulu in the much loved "Star Trek" TV series and movies, came out in an article in the Los Angeles queer newsweekly Frontiers, adding that he's been with his partner for nearly two decades. The Japanese-American Takei lived in a World War II U.S. internment camp as a child.  He said he grew up feeling shameful about his ethnicity and his sexuality.  He likened prejudice against lesbians and gay men to racial segregation. Takei said, "The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay.  The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue.  That would have been unthinkable when I was young." The now-68-year-old actor has been with his partner, Brad Altman, for 18 years. Takei joined the "Star Trek" cast in 1973 as Mr. Sulu, a character he played for three seasons on television and in six subsequent films, and he also ran for the Los Angeles City Council in 1973.  He continues to act with the East West Players, a Los Angeles theatre group of which he is the president.  George Takei: still going where no senior-Asian-American-Gay-Stage-TV-science fiction actor has gone before.