“NewsWrap"
for the week ending March 29, 2008

(As broadcast on "This Way Out" program #1,044, distributed 3-31-08)
[Written by Greg Gordon, with thanks to Rex Wockner with Bill Kelley]

Reported this week by Erica Springer and Greg Gordon

  Thirty men have been arrested in a so-called “morals” raid on a private home in the Iranian city of Esfahan.  Citing sources within Iran, Human Rights Watch said this week that the men have been held since late February without access to lawyers and without being formally charged.
They're reportedly accused of consensual homosexual conduct and drinking alcohol.  According to Human Rights Watch, police forced the men to undergo forensic medical examinations to look for “evidence” that they've engaged in homosexual acts.
It wasn't the first such raid in the Islamic Republic.  Police invaded another private party in an apartment building, also in Esfahan, during a nationwide “morality” crackdown in May 2007.  They arrested 87 people, mostly men, 24 of whom were tried for “facilitating immorality and sexual misconduct.”  A court found all of them guilty in June 2007, sentencing most to as many as 80 lashes and fines equivalent to 5,000 U.S. dollars.  Those verdicts are under appeal and have not yet been enforced.
Citing its unnamed sources in Iran, Human Rights Watch said that police have intensified surveillance and harassment of people connected to those May 2007 arrests.  Several men described being detained and interrogated by police, who demanded the names of their associates.
Iranian law punishes consensual penetrative same-gender sex between men with death, and non-penetrative activity with up to 100 lashes.  Lesbian sexual conduct is punishable by lashings, and death on the fourth conviction.
Last September Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad infamously declared during a speech at Columbia University in New York City that there were no homosexuals in his country.

  But elsewhere in the Middle East, the Israeli government has granted a Palestinian man provisional permission to move from the occupied West Bank to Tel Aviv so that he can be reunited with his gay partner.  Palestinians in the occupied territories are rarely granted permission to live with their Israeli partners, regardless of sexuality.  Peter Lerner, a spokesperson for the Israeli military in the West Bank, told reporters that the Palestinian man's lawyer convinced them that he received death threats from fellow Palestinians after his sexual orientation was discovered.  Another reason for granting the temporary permit was reportedly the health of the Israeli partner, who suffers from heart disease.  Citing privacy concerns, Lerner didn't give the men's names, but said that the two have been in a relationship for about eight years.  The Palestinian man's permit must be renewed every month until the Interior Ministry makes a final decision about his application for permanent residence under family reunification laws.

  Cuban lawmakers will vote in June on a bill that would make the country one of the world's most progressive for LGBT civil rights.  Draft legislation introduced this week would make it illegal to discriminate in jobs and housing based on sexual orientation or gender identity.  It would recognize same-gender domestic partnerships, but not grant marriage or adoption rights.  The measure would also allow transsexuals to have identity cards showing the gender with which they identify, and require the government health service to pay for sex reassignment surgery.  The legislation has been championed by Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban president Raul Castro, and the niece of former leader Fidel.  Mariela heads the government-funded National Center for Sex Education and has been a longtime LGBT rights advocate.
The bill's introduction represents rapid, almost head-spinning progress for the island's LGBT people.  Gays and lesbians long struggled for identity under the 5-decade rule of Fidel Castro.  There are no gay clubs in Havana, although one bar does offer a weekly "gay night".  Gay men were regularly rounded up and jailed under Fidel's predecessor Fulgencio Batista, but after the Communist revolution many were sent to forced labor camps for so-called "re-education and rehabilitation."
In another sign of social change under Raul Castro, the country ended restrictions on the general public's use of cell phones this week, previously allowed only to foreigners and government officials - although most Cubans still can't afford them.

  Three hundred two couples have taken advantage of Mexico City's civil union law since it came into force in March 2007, according to recently-released government statistics.  Unions have been registered in 15 of the city's 16 boroughs, and some 94 percent of them were by gays and lesbians.
The law allows same-gender and heterosexual couples - as well as two friends, roommates or extended family members - to register their relationship and gain spousal rights in areas such as inheritance, pensions, property, co-parenting and medical decisions.  Only one couple has dissolved a civil union, and one union ended when a partner died.
The northern state of Coahuila, which borders Texas, is the only other locale in Mexico with a civil union law.

  In 1998 Ecuador became the first nation in the Americas to adopt constitutional language banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.
But former model and television news anchor Rosanna Queirolo, who won election to the South American country's National Assembly on a platform of environmental protection, has caused widespread controversy by embracing the country's ultra-conservative Christian Evangelical movement and urging changes to those constitutional protections.
She asked her colleagues to change wording in the constitution referring to "sexual orientation” to "preference" because “orientation,” she said, could also be applied to "pedophiles and other degenerates."
Expanding on her remarks during a March 25th interview with “El Universo” newspaper, she said that “the word 'orientation' leaves the door open to pedophiles, to bestiality.”
Several members of her own party have condemned Queirolo's remarks.  Fernando Cordero, Vice President of the Assembly, told the newspaper that "Those who promote this debate seek to tarnish the name of the Assembly, to divide Assembly members and the Ecuadorian people."

  The leader of a Nigerian queer rights group was violently attacked this week while attending a funeral.
The unnamed leader is the director of the Port Harcourt chapter of Changing Attitude Nigeria, the African nation's leading LGBT advocacy group.  According to their press release, the activist said he was approached by a man who asked to speak with him away from the service.  He said he complied, and was then brutally beaten and kicked by a group of six men.  "I thought they were going to kill me there and then," he said.  “They were shouting, 'You notorious homosexual, you think you can run away from us for your notorious group to cause more abomination in our land?'”  The attackers also threatened to kill other members of Changing Attitude Nigeria for "inducting young people."
“I suspect an insider or one of the leaders of our Anglican church have hands in this,” the man said in the press release.  He also charged the Church of Nigeria with inciting violence, including the country's notoriously anti-queer Archbishop Peter Akinola, who also presides over the traditionalist Global South Anglican steering committee.  Those Anglican leaders, based primarily in Africa, Latin America and Asia, have threatened to leave the global Christian consortium because its North American regions, including the U.S. Episcopal Church, have adopted progressive positions on the inclusion of LGBT people in the Church.

  Despite last week's dire warning from Polish President Lech Kaczynski that supporting the proposed European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights would open the door to same-gender marriage in the devoutly Catholic country, his citizens apparently don't believe him - 69%, according to a poll published by the daily newspaper “Gazeta Wyborcza.”  Moreover, 65% want Poland to endorse the Charter, while only 15% were against it.
The notoriously homophobic Kaczynski used footage of two New York gay men getting married in Canada in his nationally televised speech to claim that the Charter would "affect the accepted moral order in Poland."

  In the U.S., Peter Sprigg, Vice President of Policy at the notoriously right wing Family Research Council this week sent a letter to the LGBT advocacy group Immigration Equality apologizing for his recent comments suggesting that lesbigay Americans should be exiled.  "I used language that... did not communicate respect for the essential dignity of every human being as a person created in the image of God," Sprigg wrote.  "I apologize for speaking in a way that did not reflect the standards which the Family Research Council and I embrace."

  Members of the Oklahoma City chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays - or P-FLAG - met with Republican state legislator Sally Kern this week to express concern over her recent homophobic comments - including the assertion that gays are "the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism."
Kern maintained her refusal to apologize during the meeting, according to a P-FLAG statement, but did seem to support workplace anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation.  P-FLAG says it believes the meeting was the beginning of a dialogue.  It was Kern's first-ever with a group working for LGBT equality.

  And finally, it really wasn't much of a secret, but frontman Michael Stipe of the popular rock group R.E.M. officially came out in a March 18th interview with “Spin” magazine.
"It was super complicated for me in the '80s," he said.  "I was totally open with the band and my family and my friends, and certainly the people I was sleeping with.  I thought it was pretty obvious... Now,” Stipe says, “I recognize that for public figures to be very open about their sexuality helps some kid somewhere."


**************
Create a Home Theater Like the Pros. Watch the video on AOL Home.
(http://home.aol.com/diy/home-improvement-eric-stromer?video=15&ncid=aolhom00030000000001)