CANADA TO APPEAL GAY PENSION CASE
Canada's Justice Department said Jan. 19 it will appeal a recent ruling in a class-action lawsuit that granted gays and lesbians expanded access to Canada Pension Plan (CPP) benefits.
When the federal government extended numerous spousal benefits to same-sex couples in 2000, it chose Jan. 1, 1998, as the date for retroactive access to pensions. The class-action ruling rolled that date back to April 17, 1985—the day equality guarantees took effect in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The extension increased the number of gays and lesbians eligible for CPP benefits by approximately 1,500, at an estimated cost to the government of $400 million (US$307 million).
According to Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper, the government believes providing benefits retroactive to 1998 was already quite generous.
CHINESE TRANS
GETS MARRIED
The first person in China to have a sex-reassignment operation was legally married Dec. 30.
'A-gang,' 29, who used to be a woman but is now a man, married 'Xiaoli' in the southwestern city of Chengdu, the Chengdu Commercial Daily reported.
The couple has lived together for three years and A-gang underwent surgery last May in Shenzhen. He received a new identity card and residence record, reflecting his new gender, shortly thereafter.
'All these years, I've yearned for love but never imagined I would taste it,' he told the Daily. 'And when I finally met Xiaoli, I didn't dare think about marriage. I'm at a loss for words now that I've finally fulfilled both my wishes.'
UK MEN EXPECT HIV DISCLOSURE
Sixty-eight percent of 16,871 men questioned in the United Kingdom's latest Gay Men's Sex Survey expect a prospective sex partner who is HIV-positive to reveal his status before they have sex.
Forty-four percent of HIV-negative and untested respondents would decline to have sex with someone who revealed his positive status. Forty-five percent would go ahead and have sex but be 'extra careful.'
'This strongly suggests that one very common strategy for avoiding HIV infection being employed by men not tested positive is the expectation that men with HIV will inform them prior to sex which in turn will allow them to avoid exposure by either avoiding sex with the infected man or modifying the sex they have with him,' researchers said.
'Over a third of all men not tested HIV-positive both expected a positive partner to disclose their status prior to sex and would not want to then have sex if they did. In this climate, it is difficult to see what incentive men with HIV have for disclosing their HIV status. Disabusing negative and untested men of the notion that positive HIV disclosure will happen (and that their risk assessments can be based on such an assumption) remains a vital health promotion aim.'
The Sigma Research survey was conducted in person, via the mail and online.
CARDINAL: GAYS
ARE PERVERTS
Most gays and lesbians are not really gay, they're just perverts, Belgian Roman Catholic Cardinal Gustaaf Joos told the weekly P-magazine Jan. 21.
'All those who say they are lesbian or gay, a maximum of five to 10 percent are effectively lesbian or gay,' Joos, 80, said. 'All the rest are simply sexual perverts. Don't hesitate to write that down. I demand you write that down. I don't care if they all come and protest at my door. I won't open the door.'
A spokesman for the Belgian Catholic hierarchy said Joos was speaking only on his own behalf. Pope John Paul II made Joos a cardinal last year.
OFFICIALS MUST MARRY GAYS
OR RESIGN
The Vital Statistics Agency in the Canadian province of British Columbia Jan. 14 ordered the province's marriage commissioners to start performing weddings for same-sex couples or resign by March 31.
British Columbia is one of two Canadian provinces where full same-sex marriage was legalized by court order last year. The other is Ontario. Foreigners can marry in those provinces, as well. They can purchase a license and marry the same day.
Canada's federal government has said it agrees with the rulings by the British Columbia and Ontario supreme courts and will legalize same-sex marriage nationwide this year, although there has been some foot-dragging at the federal level since Paul Martin replaced Jean Chrétien as prime minister on Dec. 12.
The only other nations that let gays marry under the ordinary marriage laws are Belgium and the Netherlands. Numerous countries offer same-sex civil unions or domestic-partnership registration.
NO TAX BREAK FOR GERMAN GAYS
Gay couples united under Germany's civil-union law cannot pay their income taxes as if they were married, a state court in Saarbrücken ruled Jan. 22.
According to a report in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Judge Axel Schmidt-Liebig said civil-unioned couples cannot use the tactic of 'income splitting' whereby a married couple with substantially divergent incomes combines them at tax time to end up owing less total tax than if they had filed individually.
CARDINAL SUPPORTS CONDOM USE
A Belgian cardinal who has been seen as a possible candidate for pope says HIV-positive people must use condoms when having sex with an uninfected partner.
The statement contradicts Roman Catholic teaching, which demands that every sex act must be open to the possibility of pregnancy.
'When someone is seropositive and his partner says: I want to have sexual relations with you—he doesn't have to do that, if you ask me—but when he does, he has to use a condom,' Brussels Cardinal Godfried Danneels, 70, told a local television program Jan. 11.
The church says married couples should not have sex if one of them is HIV-positive, and prohibits all sex outside of marriage.
FRENCH EDITOR FACES CHARGES
The associate editor of the French gay magazine Têtu, Judith Silberfeld, faces charges of abusing a member of the government for reporting that anti-gay Deputy Families Minister Christian Jacob has spent 'a lot of time studying the media and television, the running of which he understood very little about.'
The magazine's December 2002 Web report was quoting an e-mail that appeared to have come from Jacob's office but was in fact fake. Têtu quickly published a retraction but Jacob pursued legal action anyway, alleging defamation.
The magistrate who summoned Silberfeld said she had used 'expressions suggesting that the deputy minister for the family did not have the intelligence that should be expected for someone in his position.'
The current issue of Têtu accuses Jacob of waging a personal vendetta against Silberfeld.
