“NewsWrap" for the week ending July 5, 2008 (As broadcast on "This Way Out" program #1,058, distributed 7-7-08) [Written by Greg Gordon, with thanks to Rex Wockner with Bill Kelley] Reported this week by Christopher Gaal and Steve Levin Hundreds of LGBT people and their supporters took to the streets of Calcutta, Bangalore and New Delhi on June 29th in the largest displays of Pride ever held in India. Some marchers in each of the 3 cities wore rainbow-colored masks to hide their identities, but one participant, openly gay lawyer Alok Gupta, told the “Associated Press” that “This is a national coming-out party.” He called the over-riding demand of the marchers “a simple thing: We are seeking the right to love.” Activists have mounted a protracted legal challenge to Section 377 of India’s penal code, which criminalizes consensual adult same-gender sex as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” punishable by up to 10 years in prison. While it’s a rarely-enforced remnant of British colonial rule, India’s conservative government believes it’s representing predominant social attitudes by defending the retention of the law. Opponents charge that it implicitly supports discrimination, and is used to bully and extort LGBT people. The country’s High Court on July 4th agreed with the Naz Foundation, the non-governmental LGBT and HIV/AIDS advocacy group that’s challenging Section 377, to “fast-track” the case, and scheduled a full hearing for July 21st. LGBT people and their allies also marched with Pride in two European cities this week. In the German capital, the parade started for the first time in what was formerly East Berlin, winding its way to the Victory column in the west of the city. Tens of thousands refused to let occasional showers rain on their parade, and a rose was placed at the recently dedicated monument to LGBT victims of the Nazi regime. In Paris, popular openly gay Mayor Bertrand Delanoë was among a half-million people celebrating LGBT Pride under a river of rainbow flags. He’s been mentioned as a possible Socialist Party candidate for President in 2012, and has stated publicly that he thinks France is ready for an openly gay head of state. At the annual Pride march in New York City, home of the 1969 Stonewall Riots which Pride events around the world now commemorate, crowds cheered Governor David Paterson a month after he directed state agencies to provide marriage benefits to same-gender couples who’ve been legally wed elsewhere. He was the first New York governor to participate in that city’s Pride parade. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was also warmly received at the annual Pride parade in Boston in mid-June, where he marched with his youngest daughter Katherine, who’d come out as lesbian a few weeks earlier. Tens of thousands also celebrated Pride in mid-June in Indianapolis, Indiana. The traditional Dykes on Bikes led off the 38th annual Pride parade in San Francisco on June 29th, but this year many of them wore bridal veils, wedding gowns, and tossed bouquets in celebration of the recent California Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, which took effect on June 16th. Thousands of same-gender couples have already married in the state, despite a looming November ballot initiative that would overturn the high court ruling and constitutionally ban them. Arizona’s legislature voted this week to put a similar proposal on their state ballot. Voters will also decide on a constitutional same-gender marriage ban this November in Florida. Members of the Canadian Armed Forces, marching in uniform for the first time, were among about 5 thousand participants at Toronto’s LGBT Pride parade on June 29th before an estimated one million spectators. Military personnel also staffed a recruitment booth at the parade’s starting point. Canada lifted its ban on military service by open gays and lesbians in 1992. But LGBT people and their supporters had a difficult time celebrating Pride in three Eastern European cities this week. The “Associated Press” reported that dozens of protesters attacked the July 5th march in Budapest, pelting participants with eggs, bottles and rocks, and throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at police officers who were guarding them. At least 45 protesters were arrested, and two officers were hurt in the melees. Two gay businesses in the Hungarian capital were firebombed earlier in the week in advance of the Pride march. No one was hurt by a gasoline bomb that exploded in the basement of Action, a gay bar, but fumes from the subsequent multiple firebombing of Magnum, a gay sauna, injured at least one. Phone calls to the venues right before each bombing warned people to evacuate, but LGBT activists called them terrorist attacks. Pride parades had been held for several years in Budapest without incident until last year, when ultra-nationalists and skinheads attacked some of the marchers with bottles, smoke bombs and Molotov cocktails. While police officials had expressed concerns about violence at this year’s Pride march, city officials nevertheless issued a permit to a right wing group to hold a counter-demonstration along the same route. A message on the group’s Web site said "We will not tolerate foreign perverts of whatever color forcing their alien and sick world onto Hungary." About 20 people were hurt as a mob of 150 nationalist extremists launched a tear gas attack on the first-ever Pride parade in the Czech Republic on June 28th. Two Pride marchers and one police officer in the country’s second largest city of Brno required emergency medical treatment. Various reports said that from 3 to 7 anti-queer protesters were arrested. The attack ended the planned two-hour parade after about 20 minutes. The route had already been shortened after protesters threw eggs and fireworks into a crowd of about 500 participants who’d gathered at the starting point of the march. Czech-born lesbian tennis legend Martina Navratilova and the country’s human rights minister, Dzamila Stehlikova, reportedly attended, but were not injured. Riot police arrested about 60 far-right demonstrators who were protesting Bulgaria’s first-ever Pride march in the capital city of Sofia on the same day. One man threw a gasoline bomb near the marchers, numbering about 150 people, while others hurled eggs, rocks, and bottles at them but no serious injuries were reported. Religious leaders annd right wing groups had demanded that the march be banned. Even Socialist Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said he was uncomfortable with what he called "the manifestation and demonstration of such orientations." The far-right Bulgarian National Union had called for open resistance to the march with a weeklong campaign featuring posters that read “Be Intolerant, Be Normal.” The group’s leader was among those arrested. In other news, what some critics are calling “a church within a church” was created at the conclusion this week of the Global Anglican Future Conference, a gathering in Jersualem of hundreds of bishops, clergy and lay people mostly from the Church’s African, Latiin American and Asian regions who oppose LGBT-supportive actions taaken by the North American branches of the worldwide Christian consortium. The new body, called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, will have its own bishops, clergy, theological colleges, and will embrace disaffected Canadian Anglican and U.S. Episcopal congregations who also oppose the queer-inclusive paths their branches have taken, including the consecration in 2003 of openly gay New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson. While the Fellowship, composed of some 300 of Anglicanism’s 800 bishops, insists that it wants to remain part of the 80-million-member Communion, formation of the new group represents a direct challenge to the authority of the Church’s titular leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. A statement issued by the breakaway bishops said that “we do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury.” Williams, who’s unsuccessfully tried to walk a theological tightrope and hold the Communion together, criticized the new group, saying that “to improvise solutions that may seem to be effective for some in the short term... will continue to create more problems than they solve." The impact of the split will likely be evident at the Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade Anglican policy-making gathering, scheduled for later this month in London. Several prominent conservative bishops are boycotting the meeting. Retired Republican U.S. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whom many believe to have been the most homophobic politician in modern American history, died at the age of 86 this week. He infamously charged that "The ‘New York Times’ and ‘Washington Post’ are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian." Commenting about gays and AIDS, he said that “It's their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease.” Few in the LGBT communities will mourn him, and fewer still will miss him. The so-called “Marriage Protection Amendment,” another attempt to define matrimony as exclusively heterosexual in the U.S. Constitution, is being introduced in Congress a predictable Republican ttactic during an election year. Two “defenders” of heterosexual marriage are among its co-sponsors: U.S. Senators David Vitter of Louisiana, identified last year as a client of a major Washington, D.C. prostitution ring; and Larry Craig of Idaho, who still maintains his heterosexuality after infamously being busted last year for soliciting an undercover policeman in a Minneapolis airport restroom. And finally, the rabidly homophobic American Family Association distributed a very queer “Associated Press” story about U.S. Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay on its online OneNewsNow network this week. While the A.F.A. is not identified anywhere on the site as its registered owner, the group always changes the word “gay” in the so-called “news stories” it posts to “homosexual”. Although the “Associated Press” was credited as the source, the A.F.A. rewrite which has since been taken down wa was headlined “Homosexual Eases Into 100 Final at Olympic Events,” and included such gems as "Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue... with red and white diagonal stripes across the front, along with matching shoes, all in a tribute to 1936 Olympic star Jesse Owens,” and “Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice [that] he's certainly someone to watch in Beijing.” The Famous, the infamous, the lame - in your browser. Get the TMZ Toolbar Now!