NewsWrap for the week ending March 11, 2006 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #937, distributed 3-13-06) [Written this week by Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon, with thanks to Graham Underhill and Rex Wockner] Reported this week by Jon Beaupré and Rick Watts A tabloid newspaper publisher and two gay men have been jailed in Cameroon on the heels of several sensationalized tabloid reports collectively "outing" more than 300 well-known celebrities and government officials. Street vendors in that central African country were forced to sell photocopies of the weekly tabloids, screaming such headlines as "The Queers Are Among Us," after each paper's entire print run sold out within hours. Several thousand members of a group calling itself Free Youths gathered outside the court in the capital city of Yaoundé to condemn homosexuality at the start of a defamation trial in late February that pitted "outed" government Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Gregoire Owona against two of the tabloids, L'Anecdote and Nouvelle Afrique. The trial concluded last week, with L'Anecdote publisher Jean Pierre Amougou Belinga being sentenced to four months in jail and ordered to pay a symbolic few cents to Owona for libeling him, and the equivalent of about 2,000 U.S. dollars in penalties to the state. He was also ordered to arrange for the judgement to be published in 15 local and international newspapers, and on radio and television stations. Belinga had claimed to have unimpeachable documents to back up the list of alleged gays and lesbians whose names and photos he published. However, concluding the two-week trial, Judge Alexandre Amougou Anaba said Belinga had failed to produce any evidence to support having Owona on those lists. She also noted Cameroonian society's strong disapproval of homosexuality, which is also illegal there, punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Two men were sentenced to one-year jail terms in Cameroon last week for having sex with each other, according to international news reports and human rig hts groups. In an unrelated but more publicized case, trial began in late February for 8 men and a 17-year-old boy charged with homosexuality. They've all been in jail since last May following a raid on a gay nightclub in Yaoundé. Two other men arrested in the raid were released last week. A government prosecutor had ordered the detainees to undergo physical examinations to determine whether or not they'd had anal sex. Several human rights groups protested that order in a letter to Cameroon's minister of justice, and reportedly no such exams have taken place. Paula Ettelbrick of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission worries that "a climate of public homophobia has emerged in Cameroon that causes great concern about the fate of the remaining detainees." Amnesty International has called them "prisoners of conscience," and this week urged its global membership to petition Cameroon to release the nine detainees, expressing concern that they are being subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." A verdict in the case is expected to be issued next week. Another international human rights group, Human Rights Watch, has condemned plans by the Netherlands to send asylum-seeking gay Iranians back to their home country. Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk this week announced an end to a 6-month moratorium that had been imposed on deporting the refugees following the public hangings of two teens in Iran for alleged gay sex. According to Scott Long of Human Rights Watch's LGBT Rights Program, "Men and women suspected of homosexual conduct in Iran face the threat of execution... We have documented brutal floggings imposed by courts as punishment, and torture and ill treatment, including sexual abuse, in police custody." He added that Iran's criminal code makes sexual intercourse between men a crime "punishable by death" and that women who have sex with women face the same punishment. In a letter to the Dutch Parliament last month, Verdonk claimed that no Iranians had been executed for being homosexual, despite the reported hanging of those 2 teenagers, who the Iranian government said were executed for raping an under-age boy. "For homosexual men and women," Verdonk wrote, "it is not totally impossible to function in society, although they should be wary of coming out of the closet too openly." The issue has created controversy in the parliament, with the opposition calling for a full debate. Human Rights Watch says that, "the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits the Netherlands from deporting a person who may be at risk of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling this week upheld the Solomon Amendment, which requires universities that accept federal funding to give military recruiters the same on-campus access that any other employers get. Several colleges' non-discrimination policies include opposition to the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on openly-lesbian or -gay military personnel, and some 300 million dollars in federal funds for those colleges and universities were at stake. Recently-confirmed Associate Justice Samuel Alito was not involved in the unanimous 8-to-0 ruling because he was not on the bench when the case was argued. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed First Amendment free speech arguments made by a coalition of several U.S. law schools, saying that Congress has the constitutional power to simply force schools to give access to military recruiters "under its authority to raise and support armies." Both the Human Rights Campaign and the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network used the opportunity to urge Congress to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," while noting that the military ban itself was not at issue in the case. Roberts, in fact, mentioned homosexuality only in passing, and never referred to the policy. A ruling is awaited in a lawsuit directly challenging "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" from a federal court in Boston. Caught between the rock of a Vatican directive against placing adoptive children in gay and lesbian homes and the hard place of Massachusetts' non-discrimination law, Boston Catholic Charities has decided to discontinue its adoption services altogether. The controversy began last November when it came to light that of the 720 special needs children placed by the agency since 1977, 13 had gone to same-gender parents. Boston's Archbishop Sean O'Malley received direct orders from the Vatican in December saying that Catholic agencies are prohibited from involvement in adoptions by lesbian and gay couples. Those instructions were in keeping with a 2003 document that called same-gender adoptions "gravely immoral," in that they "would actually mean doing violence to these children." However the 42-member Catholic Charities board voted overwhelmingly to stick with the state's laws mandating equal treatment for gay and lesbian couples in spite of Rome's wishes. When Archbishop O'Malley and the other three diocesan bishops announced their intention to seek an exemption from the non-discrimination laws anyway, eight members of the board resigned in protest. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon and a potential contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, expressed his sympathy for the bishops' "freedom of religion" position, but determined he was powerless to provide an exemption by executive order. State legislative leaders also warned the bishops that they should not expect relief from them. That left a court battle the only option available to the Boston Archdiocese, which is already straining under a 93 million-dollar settlement for its nearly 1,000 sex-abuse cases. Finally church officials made the surprise announcement on March 10th that the agency would leave the adoption business rather than comply with the law. But the story does not end in Boston. Another communiqué from Rome now has the Archdiocese of San Francisco reconsidering its adoption policies. This message came from San Francisco's former Archbishop William Levada, who replaced the former Cardinal Ratzinger -- now Pope Benedict XVI -- as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Levada admitted that three children had been placed with same-gender parents during his tenure in San Francisco, but now says that no bishop should allow adoptions by gays and lesbians. On the other side of the Roman Catholic coin, 19 priests in the overwhelmingly Catholic Canadian province of Quebec have published a 1000-word letter supporting same-gender marriage and the ordination of gay men. In their February 26th missive, the priests denounced the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops' opposition to same-gender marriage before Parliament last year. The letter asked, "Was there any trace of the compassion that marked Jesus' passage on Earth?" and went on to declare, "[There was] not a paragraph, not a sentence in your brief that takes into account the historical discrimination against homosexuals and the tragedy of their social and ecclesial exclusion." The priests' stand is thought to represent the broadest open protest of Vatican policies in Canada since the 1968 encyclical that ruled artificial contraception immoral. And finally, all they wanted to do was dialogue, but they were arrested instead. The Equality Ride, organized by the non-denominational religious group Soulforce, is inspired by the U.S. civil rights Freedom Rides of the 1950s and 60s. Activists are busing across the country to about 15 colleges and uni versities that ban enrollment by openly queer students. However, despite an uneventful similar visit last year to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Chancellor and founder Reverend Jerry Falwell warned the bus riders in advance not to set foot on his campus. "The parents of our students have entrusted their sons and daughters to our care," he said in a statement. "Liberty has an obligation to these parents not to expose their children to a 'media circus' that might present immorality in a positive light." Some 60 people, including 35 Equality Riders, gathered for a late-morning rally on a sidewalk outside the school's main entrance on March 10th, their first stop on the tour. But when they attempted to move onto the campus to speak with students more than 20 of them were arrested and lead away in handcuffs for trespassing. Two face additional charges of inciting to trespass. Soulforce member Jacob Reitan told reporters that "We want[ed] to come to the school today to say, "'Learn from history'... We have a right to question and to show how we are children of God" -- although apparently not at the oxymoronically named *Liberty* University.