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World Watch
George Broadhead casts a global eye
over the world's news.
UK grants refugee status
to Iranian lesbian
Pegah Emambakhsh, an
Iranian lesbian, has been granted refugee
status in the UK after almost four
years, according to the campaign group
IRanian Queer Railroad (IRQR).
IRQR has been following
Emambakhsh’s case since 2006.
“We remember a day that
British authorities decided to deport her
back to Iran and hundreds of people
protested at this inhuman action,” says the
group. “Pegah supporters sent a multitude of
emails and faxes to the British Home Office
and their Members of Parliament to stop her
deportation.”
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Pegah Emambakhsh |
The widespread
international campaign to save Emambakhsh’s
life, says the group, has involved
governmental institutions, human-rights
organisations, LGBT activist groups,
intellectuals, experts in international law
and “millions of people who have come to
love Pegah, [and] succeeded in achieving a
positive outcome”.
“I could not believe it.
I did not read any papers so far,” the group
quotes Emambakhsh as having said in a
telephone conversation. “A few hours ago, I
received a phone call from my lawyer that I
granted refugee status.
IRQR is appealing for
international support to help Iranian
lesbians and gays. You can find its website
here.
Venting
their spleen on Gene
Opponents of rights for
gays in the USA complained this month
that the Inaugural Committee organising
events for Barak Obama’s entry into the Oval
Office asked the gay Episcopalian bishop
Gene Robinson to say the prayer for the
inaugural week’s events.
Opponents say it’s a way
of placating gays, but the committee said it
wasn’t about righting any perceived wrongs.
Robinson, they said, had been on their list
for weeks, and they chose him because of his
message of inclusive civil rights.
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Gene Robinson:
on the list for weeks |
Robinson’s election as a
bishop and subsequent elevation to the
episcopate continues to excite protest and
condemnation among religious gay-haters (as
evidenced at the ten-yearly Lambeth
Conference last year). You can read
here a feature article that the print
version of G&LH carried in 2003.
Protests in Nigeria
Humanists in Nigeria
have condemned the vote by the country’s
House of Representatives banning same-sex
marriage.
The Bill, “for an Act to
prohibit marriage between persons of the
same gender, solemnization of same and other
matters related therewith”, has been passed
unanimously by the Lower House of the
country’s Parliament.
All the members who spoke
in favour of the Bill condemned such
marriage, saying that it was immoral,
against African tradition and God’s design
for human beings. One noted that this was a
sign of moral decadence in any given society
and went against God’s purpose of creating
the institution of marriage.
He stressed that such
acts as stated in both the Islamic and
Christian religions were ungodly. Another
member argued that it was “against my faith
to have same-sex marriage. It is against our
penal code to even engage in activities
between man and man, as well as woman and
woman. It is time for us to think back and
look at the scourge of HIV/AIDS. The
greatest means of transmitting this disease
is through the act of sodomy.”
Leo Igwe, the executive
secretary of the
Nigerian Humanist Movement, issued a
public statement saying, “This vote is a
step backward for Nigeria’s democracy and a
breach of the nation’s human-rights
obligations. Banning gay marriage will
increase homophobia and attacks on lesbian
and gay people. It will undermine Nigeria’s
efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS,
especially among gays.
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Leo Igwe |
“At a time when many
civilised nations are taking measures to
abolish all forms of discrimination on the
basis of gender and sexual orientation, we
humanists call on President Musa Yar’dua not
to sign this oppressive and retrogressive
bill into law.”
The
Pink Triangle Trust (publishers of G&LH)
supported Igwe in a recent press release:
“This is not the first time Leo Igwe has
spoken out so courageously against his
country’s antigay legislation, and the
humanist position is in sharp contrast to
the overwhelming support it receives from
religious sources, notably the head of
Nigeria’s Anglican Church, Archbishop Peter
Akinola, who has notoriously described gays
as ‘lower than dogs’.”
Protests at Vatican gay
hate
About 250 people held a
sit-in by St Peter’s Square in December
against the Vatican’s opposition to a UN
resolution that would decriminalise
homosexuality worldwide.
Many of the protestors –
under banners of two leading lesbian and gay
groups,
Arcigay and
Arcilesbica – lit candles. Some wore
nooses around their necks to highlight the
fact that some countries – notably Islamic
ones – often execute known homosexuals.
More than 80 countries
have laws against homosexuality.
In may last year, France
launched an initiative for a UN resolution
for the universal decriminalisation of
homosexuality. But this was opposed by the
Vatican because it might encourage gay
marriage.
Arcigay’s president,
Aurelio Mancuso, criticised “the bad choice
the Vatican has made as a state, not as a
church”.
A Vatican spokesman,
Federico Lombardi, said such a resolution
“could clearly become a way to pressure or
discriminate against those who [. . .]
consider marriage between a man and a woman
to be the basic and original form of social
life”.
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St Peter’s
Square, Rome. |
But he added that the
Roman Catholic Church opposed “all forms of
violent or discriminatory penal law
regarding homosexuals [. . .] No one
obviously wants to defend the death penalty
for homosexuals.”
If the Vatican is, as it
claims, a foremost campaigner against the
death penalty, one wonders why it is willing
to encourage the death penalty by
seeking to keep homosexuality illegal in the
killer states.
Prop 8 opponents blamed
for vandalism
Catholics in San
Francisco have been urged to phone Mayor
Gavin Newsom to protest about vandalism at
Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in the
city’s Castro District.
The Catholic League for
Religious and Civil Rights sent out an email
claiming that opponents of Proposition 8,
which amended the California Constitution to
ban same-sex marriage, defaced the church
with swastikas alongside the names of Pope
Ratzinger and the San Francisco archbishop.
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Mayor Gavin
Newsom |
“Part of the blame for
the latest attack goes to San Francisco
Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco
Board of Supervisors,” the email said,
because “they say nothing” when “gay men
dressed as nuns show up at Mass”.
Meanwhile, proponents of
same-sex marriage held an “equality camp” in
San Francisco this month to train activists
to “leverage social media/social
network/Internet-based activities” around
fighting for gay marriage and combine them
with traditional political organising.
Proponents of same-sex
marriage also organised a nationwide
demonstration against the National Defense
of Marriage Act, which was passed by
Congress in 1996.
In the meantime, the
legal wrangling over Proposition 8
continues. Opponents of the measure filed a
lawsuit challenging its legality the day
after the election. The state’s Supreme
Court could hear arguments as soon as March.
Gay-friendly parish earns
archbishop’s ire
The Roman Catholic
Archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, is
deciding whether to expel a gay-friendly
Catholic parish in South Brisbane, after he
described the parish’s liturgical practices
“frightening”.
In a letter to St Mary’s
parish priest, Father Peter Kennedy,
Bathersby said that he would make a final
decision on the parish’s future by the end
of January.
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Archbishop John
Bathersby:
irked by “unconventional”
church services |
St Mary’s, an inner-city
parish, has been in a long-running dispute
with the Catholic hierarchy over its
decision to give communion to openly gay and
lesbian parishioners, and over its
“unconventional” church services, in which
Kennedy sits among the congregation.
In his letter to Kennedy,
Bathersby says, “It is frightening to hear
that seven to nine hundred people attend the
liturgies at South Brisbane yet there seems
to be little instruction about Trinitarian
theology.”
Beheaded for male rape
Two men in Saudi Arabia
have been beheaded after being found guilty
of raping a man, according to the
country’s interior ministry.
The Kuwait Times
reported this month that the two men entered
the room of the victim while he was
sleeping, and beat him, tied him up and
raped him.
Saudi Arabia interprets
Islam strictly. Anyone convicted of murder,
rape, drug trafficking or armed robbery can
be executed with a sword. Almost a hundred
people were beheaded in 2008.
Sharia law, as
interpreted and enforced in Saudi Arabia,
also allows barbaric and inhuman punishment
for consensual homosexuality, ranging from
imprisonment to flogging. In 2007, two gay
men were given 7,000 lashes by prison
authorities there.
Jailed in Senegal
A court in Senegal has
jailed nine gay men for eight years each.
The nine, all aged under
30, appeared in court this month charged
with “indecent conduct and unnatural acts
and membership of a criminal organisation”.
“This is the first time
that the Senegalese legal system [has
handed] down such a harsh sentence against
gays,” said Issa Diop,
one of four defence lawyers representing the
men.
Joel Nana, of the
International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights
Commission (IGLHRC), said, “We are in
shock. This is the first case that I have
heard of where someone is sentenced to eight
years in jail for homosexuality.”
In Senegal, where 95 per
cent of the population is Muslim, homosexual
acts are punishable with a maximum sentence
of five years.
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The mosque in
Touba, Senegal.
95 per cent of the country’s
population is Muslim |
However, the judge in the
case raised the sentence to eight years
after taking into account their “membership
of a criminal organisation”.
Most of the men were
members of an association set up to fight
AIDS.
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