Gays picket Saudi
embassy in London
About 50 people picketed Saudi Arabia's embassy in London Oct. 19 in protest against the nation's reported floggings and executions of gay men.
On Oct. 2, two Saudi men convicted of sodomy in the city of Al Bahah received the first of their 7,000 lashes in punishment, the Okaz daily newspaper reported. The whippings took place in public, the report said.
The London protest, staged just prior to a state visit by Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, was organized by the National Union of Students and the gay direct-action group OutRage!
'As well as flogging and executing gay people, the Saudi leaders are guilty of detention without trial, torture and the public beheading of women who have sex outside of marriage,' said OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell. 'The country is a theocratic police state.'
Activist Brett Lock added, 'Saudi leaders should be shunned until they stop their homophobic persecution and their many other human rights abuses.'
The activists delivered a protest letter to the Saudi ambassador, Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud.
Anti-gay Polish
PM defeated
Anti-gay Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his Europhobic, homophobic Law and Justice Party lost control of the government in the Oct. 21 general election.
They were replaced by the center-right Civic Platform party, which apparently is slightly less hostile to gays and is much friendlier toward the European Union.
Although gay activists, newspapers and former President Lech Walesa reportedly have spread unsubstantiated rumors that the unmarried Kaczynski is secretly gay, Kaczynski has called gays 'perverse,' and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, has warned that if homosexuality 'were to be promoted on a grand scale, the human race would disappear.'
Gay groups expect Civic Platform to be, at minimum, less overt in thwarting social and political progress by the nation's gay population.
'After two steps backwards, made thanks to the ruling party of Kaczynski twin brothers, the time has come for a step forwards,' activists Pawel Walczak and Michal Minalto said in a posting at the gay Web site homiki.pl.
'We may be glad that two years of irresponsible government are over, two years of increasing threats for and discrimination of lesbians and gays. However, a lot of work is before us.'
Singapore MPs
keep gay-sex ban
Singapore's Parliament decriminalized oral and anal sex for heterosexuals Oct. 23 but declined to also legalize gay sex.
Penal Code Section 377A punishes sex between men—'gross indecency'—with two years in prison. The law is rarely, if ever, enforced.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong supported keeping the ban, saying Singaporean society is conservative and he didn't want to encourage gays to start pushing for such things as access to adoption and marriage.
'We do not approve of them [ gays ] setting the tone of mainstream society,' Lee said. 'They live their lives, that's their personal space. But the tone of the overall society, I think, it remains conventional, it remains straight and we want it to remain so.
'We were right to uphold the family unit when Western countries went for experimental lifestyles in the 1960s—the hippies, free love—but I'm glad we did that because today, if you look at Western Europe, marriage as an institution is dead.'
Britain plans to ban
incitement of hatred
against gays
British Justice Secretary Jack Straw says the government plans to prohibit incitement of hatred against gay, lesbian and bisexual people.
The proposed law would ban words, writings, video, audio and behavior purposefully aimed at encouraging anti-gay hatred, under penalty of up to seven years in prison.
'It is a measure of how far we have come as a society in the past 10 years that we are now appalled by hatred and invective directed at people on the basis of their sexuality,' Straw said. 'It is time for the law to recognize this.'
Christian groups expressed alarm over the government's plan, saying that opining that gay sex is wrong should not be a crime.
But gay groups and the government said the law would not apply to temperate expression of religious views.
'However, we refuse to accept any longer that there's no connection between extreme rap lyrics calling for gay people to be attacked or fundamentalist claims that all gay people are pedophiles, and the epidemic of anti-gay violence disfiguring Britain's streets,' said Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, Britain's leading gay-lobby group.
Saudi men sentenced
to 7,000 lashes
Two Saudi men convicted of sodomy have received the first set of 7,000 lashes in punishment, the Okaz daily newspaper reported Oct. 4.
The whipping took place in public in the southwestern city of Al Bahah on Oct. 2, the paper said. The men were not named.
After the beatings, they were returned to prison to await further sets of whippings. The report did not specify how many lashes are meted out each time.
Russian
blood-donation
activists fined
Six Moscow gay activists arrested outside the Ministry of Health and Social Development while protesting Russia's ban on gay blood donors were each fined $20 or $40 Sept. 26.
Tverskoi District Court Judge Natalya Dyatlova determined the demonstrators had violated Article 20.2 of the Code on Administrative Offenses by staging an unauthorized public event.
Only protest organizer Alexey Davydov received the higher fine.
Russia banned gays from donating blood in 2001. The general prosecutor's office has since determined that the ban is illegal but the ministry has failed to lift it, said Nikolai Alekseev of Project GayRussia.Ru.
'We are going to appeal the court decision [ and if ] necessary, we are ready to take the cases of those activists up to the European Court of Human Rights,' he said.
Two Australian
women end
up married
A married couple in Australia has become a married lesbian couple after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal allowed a transgender woman to change the sex designation on her passport, SX magazine reported Oct. 4.
The couple, Fiona Power and Grace Abrams, had married in 2005 while Abrams was in the process of changing her gender.
When Abrams later applied for a new passport, she was turned down because her birth certificate says she is male, but the tribunal concluded 'it is not so much the identity of the person as she or he was in the past, but the identity of the person as at the time of the application, that is of prime importance.'
The tribunal directed the Foreign Affairs Ministry to issue the new passport, which carried the side effect of government acknowledgment of the marriage of two women.
Norwegian bishops
OK gay pastors
The Bishops' Conference of Norway's dominant Lutheran church voted 6-5 Oct. 2 to allow openly gay pastors.
The conference offers advice but does not set policy.
The matter now advances to the Church of Norway's General Synod, where a formal decision can be made. The body next meets Nov. 12-27.
—Assistance: Bill Kelley
