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World Watch
George Broadhead casts a global eye
over the world’s news.
SNP connives
with RCC
The gay humanist charity
(and publishers of G&LH) the Pink
Triangle Trust (PTT) has condemned Alex
Salmond’s SNP government for its apparent
connivance with the Catholic Church in
Scotland over its attempt to get
exemption from legislation on gay adoption.
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Alex Salmond |
In my capacity as the
PTT’s secretary, I issued the following
press release:
We understand that
the SNP government has been secretly
working with the Catholic Church to defy
legislation on gay adoption. It seems
that Fiona Hyslop, the SNP education
secretary, has lobbied Whitehall for
Catholic adoption agencies to get an
“indefinite” exemption from the
legislation, and has told the Church she
was “comfortable” with plans by a
Glasgow-based Catholic adoption service
to refuse same-sex couples. It seems
that Hyslop has had meetings with Church
representatives about how to turn away
same-sex couples. She and the St
Margaret’s Children and Family Care
Society have discussed plans to reword
the charity’s constitution in order to
allow the agency to provide its services
solely to heterosexuals.
Given that the SNP is
officially in favour of gay equality,
this a highly retrograde step. It is
quite unacceptable that any publicly
funded service should be allowed to
discriminate against gays or any other
part of the population. The PTT welcomes
the intervention of the Humanist Glasgow
MSP Patrick Harvie who is said to be
tabling questions to the government next
week on this matter and has declared:
“Any attempt to get around the law
should be stopped.”
Macedonia
says no to school RE
Religious instruction
will no longer be studied in primary schools
in Macedonia.
This comes in a ruling of
the Macedonian Constitutional Court
abolishing an article in the country’s Law
on Elementary Education, adopted in 2008.
The abolished article
said “religious instruction can be studied
in the primary schools as a subject of
personal choice”.
The Court ruled that the
article contravened the Macedonia
Constitution, whose Article 26 says
Macedonia is a secular state.
Hung or
hanged?
Over on
Pink Triangle,
G&LH’s sister publication, Warren
Allen Smith observed recently the reporting
of the death of the actor David Carradine:
RadarOnline.com shows
the following photo from Thai Rath,
one of the oldest newspapers in Thailand:
NewsnIdea.com
commented that, “David Carradine was
hung accidentally by his neck and other
body parts. Natural assumption from this
is that he was engaged in some sort of
auto-erotic asphyxiation.”
From what I can see,
however, he doesn’t look very hung. That
he was hanged, however, is right there
in living color.
Glue
On the
Pink Triangle
blog recently, Andy Armitage reported about
a very disturbing development in Iraq.
According to an article
on the American gay site Queerty.com,
homophobic, sadistic Iraqi militants are
gluing gay men’s anuses together and then
forcing them to take a diarrhoea-inducing
drink, leading to their deaths.
The site translates a
piece from Al Arabiya, which says:
A prominent Iraqi
human-rights activist says that Iraqi
militia have deployed a painful form of
torture against homosexuals by closing
their anuses using “Iranian gum.”
[. . .] Yina Mohammad told Alarabiya.net
that, “Iraqi militias have deployed an
unprecedented form of torture against
homosexuals by using a very strong glue
that will close their anus.”
According to her, the
new substance “is known as the American
hum [sic], which is an
Iranian-manufactured glue that if
applied to the skin, sticks to it and
can only be removed by surgery. After
they glue the anuses of homosexuals,
they give them a drink that causes
diarrhea. Since the anus is closed, the
diarrhea causes death.”
Videos of this form
of torture are being distributed on
mobile cellphones in Iraq.
Apparently, a crackdown
on homosexuals has been going on based on a
religious decree that demands their death;
dozens have been targeted. She says that the
persecution of homosexuals is not confined
to the Shiite clerics. Some Sunni leaders
have also declared the death penalty for
sodomy on satellite channels.
Queerty.com goes on to
say:
President Barack
Obama and Sec. of State Hillary Clinton
have made no indication these atrocities
are even on their radar. But our radar
is blip-bloop-BLEEPING with this shit.
Eurovision
Following the arrests of
gay campaigners in Moscow on 16 May, G&LH
editor Mike Foxwell wrote a robust letter to
the organisers of the Eurovision Song
Contest.
In his letter, he called
on them to protect the thousands of gay
people who are attending that day’s
Eurovision Song Contest, and to make a
public gesture to show their anger.
Here is his letter in
full:
I am alarmed at
reports on the news this morning of the
violent suppression of the Slavic Pride
event in Moscow. While I acknowledge
that the Pride event has been banned by
the Mayor of Moscow – an outrageous
enough act in itself – what concerns me
is the safety of the thousands of gay
people in Moscow at this time for the
Eurovision Song Contest.
I cannot understand
how the President of Russia is able to
guarantee the safety of one set of gay
people in Moscow, while at the same time
another group are being meted out
violence, tear gas and the rest.
I believe that the
safety of the gay people attending the
Eurovision Song Contest is now
demonstrably in grave jeopardy, and that
the European Broadcasting Union must
intervene at once to secure an assurance
from the Mayor of Moscow that violent
treatment of all gay people in Moscow
will stop immediately. And, if this
assurance cannot be obtained, then the
contest should be postponed or
cancelled; or, at the very least, the
EBU should make a very robust and formal
public condemnation of what is
happening.
Gay people have
always played an enormous part in making
the Eurovision Song Contest the great
spectacle that it is, and for the EBU to
stand by and watch gay people being
violently oppressed at the same time and
in the same place as the Eurovision Song
Contest final is totally unacceptable.
Furthermore, the EBU should, in light of
what is happening in Moscow, consider
barring contestant countries that do not
have acceptable human-rights policies.
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual
event of enormous significance, and, as
such, has the potential to wield great
power for good. It must not shrink from
this responsibility.
In the event, the EBU
declined to make any statement other than to
say that Russia had provided a fabulous
show! Also, sadly, not one participant took
the opportunity while on stage to mention
the state-sponsored violence, and in a press
interview after the Contest, Alexander Rybak,
the winner, disappointed gay-rights
campaigners when he said, naïvely, “I
think it’s a little bit sad that they chose
to have the protest today. They spent all
their energy on that parade, while the
biggest gay parade in the world was
tonight.”
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Dima Bilan (left)
& Alexander Rybak:
Pretty? Yes … Balls? No. |
Dima Bilan, last year’s
winner and the reason why the contest was
being held in Russia, said nothing.
In the
UK, Graham Norton – the BBC commentator for
the event and, himself an openly gay man –
made only a passing reference to the
violence meted out in Moscow, without even
mentioning that the oppression was towards
gay people!
Gay PM
On 27 April, Jóhanna
Sigurðardóttir became the world’s first-ever
openly gay person to be elected as a
national head of government.
Initially, she had been
appointed Prime Minister of
Iceland in February this year when the
sitting government fell following the
collapse of the country’s banking system.
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Jóhanna
Sigurðardóttir |
Between 1987 and 1994
and, again, 2007 and 2009, Sigurðardóttir
had been Iceland’s Minister of Social
Affairs and Social Security. Iceland’s
longest-serving politician, she has won
eight successive elections and been a member
of the country’s parliament, the Althing,
since 1978.
The meaning
of Matthew
The Meaning of
Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a
World Transformed
will be published in September.
Today, the name Matthew Shepard is
synonymous with gay rights, but before the
grisly events in October 1998 – when the
22-year-old gay student who was tortured and
murdered near Laramie, Wyoming, USA –
Matthew was simply Judy Shepard’s son. For
the first time in book form, she speaks
about her loss, sharing memories of Matthew,
their life as a typical American family and
the pivotal event in Laramie that changed
everything.
Meanwhile, on 20 May,
Shepard met President Barack Obama at the
White House.
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Judy Shepard with
President Obama in the Oval Office
© White House photo
by Pete Souza |
Writing on the Matthew
Shepard Foundation website, his mother
writes about that visit:
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An invitation to the
White House is an extraordinary
experience. I had no expectations of
what such an invitation may ultimately
mean to the work that we have all been
engaged in for many years. I’ve learned
that what you want to happen rarely
happens in the way you have envisioned
it. It seems things happen in their own
good time – organically – when
preparedness meets opportunity. That is
how I see the potential of the Obama
administration.
We live in a
different America now. The years of
disappointment and heartache with the
Clinton administration’s legacy of DOMA
[the US Defense of Marriage Act] and
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as well as its
failure to get hate crime legislation
through Congress, only to be followed by
the blatantly anti-gay environment of
the very long eight years of the
Bush/Cheney administration, which is now
our past, not our present, nor our
future. We may not be able to quantify
it yet – but a brand new day is coming
for the GLBT community and their friends
and families who love and support them.
I think we need to
acknowledge the bigger picture and not
lose our faith in what can be achieved
now that wide support exists in
Congress, the White House and the public
at large for the realization of equal
rights for all Americans. Perhaps we are
impatient for our issues to be resolved
because we’ve been denied them so long –
or maybe because it seems like President
Obama has been in office longer than he
actually has because of the long
campaign/election cycle and the
immediate need of his participation in
the Presidential role in addressing the
economic crisis before he was
inaugurated and truly the President. We
so desperately need him to make things
right – it feels like there has been
enough time for that to happen. In
reality he’s only been in office four
months. He campaigned for equality for
all Americans. It will happen; but he
doesn’t work in a vacuum. He still needs
our support and assistance.
Occasionally, we may feel like our
representatives aren’t in Washington to
work for us – their constituents. They
make us feel like we work for them. We
need to continue reminding them that we
helped elect them and now we want them
to act on our behalf. You must be part
of the process. Ask your representatives
to speak with and work with
Congressional leadership to recognize
our rights.
The process is like a
dance not a checklist – a dance card,
which is already filled in. We need to
allow time for negotiation and nuance.
Our issues are not the only guests at
the party either. Everyone wants
something, needs something. While it is
good to keep reminding our leaders we
are here, it is not beneficial to have
unrealistic expectations. Should there
be a timeline? Yes – but it must be
manageable. We can do this but it is
not, going to just happen. We have our
best chance now, with the key elements
in place, now we must be smart about how
we are to proceed.
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