Calif. high court OKs lesbian students expulsion

(Riverside, California) The California Supreme Court will let stand an appeals court ruling that a Lutheran school was within its rights when it expelled two students for allegedly being lesbians.

The case began in 2005 after the school’s principal, Gregory Bork, called the girls into his office and grilled them on …

‘Gay man’ disinterred in Senegal BBC News

he body of a man believed to be homosexual has twice been dug up from a Muslim cemetery in Senegal.

The man, in his 30s, was first buried on Saturday before residents of the western town of Thies dug up his body and left it near his grave, police say.

His family then reburied him, but he was once more exhumed by people who did not want him buried there. His body was dumped outside the family house.

Senegal outlaws homosexual acts but there is a tradition of effeminate men.

A police officer told the AFP news agency that the body was eventually buried away from the cemetery.

The state-owned Le Soleil newspaper reports that it was buried within the grounds of the family home.

“Goor-jiggen” (men-women) dress up as women, socialise with females and have long been tolerated in Senegal, a majority Muslim country. However, attitudes seem to be changing.

The AFP news agency reports that local imams, as well as some newspapers and radio stations, have denounced homosexuals after an appeals court last month overturned the conviction of nine people for homosexual acts.

‘Gay man’ disinterred in Senegal

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Court lets private schools expel lesbians

The state Supreme Court left intact Wednesday a lower-court ruling that said a private religious high school wasn’t covered by California civil rights law and could expel students it believed were lesbians.

Over Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar’s dissent, the court denied review of an appeal by parents of two girls who were expelled from a high school in Riverside County. A lawyer for the parents said the ruling, which is binding on trial courts statewide, would allow private schools to discriminate against students on any basis they chose, including sex and religion.

The girls were juniors at California Lutheran High School in the town of Wildomar when the principal, Gregory Bork, called them to his office in September 2005 and questioned them separately about their sexual orientation, after another student reported postings on their MySpace pages.

Bork suspended the girls based on their answers, and the school’s directors expelled them a month later. The girls, who later graduated from another high school, have not been identified and have not discussed their sexual orientation, said their parents’ attorney, Kirk Hanson.

The parents sued under the Unruh Act, a 1959 state law that forbids discrimination by businesses. It was amended in 2005 to include bias based on sexual orientation and someone else’s perception of sexual orientation. State education law also prohibits anti-gay bias, but that applies only to public schools.

In January, the Fourth District Court of Appeal in San Bernardino said the school is not a business but instead a social organization entitled to follow its principles.

Although California courts have defined such organizations as a Boys Club and the Rotary Club as businesses covered by the Unruh Act, the appeals court cited a 1998 state Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Boy Scouts to exclude gays and atheists. Like the Boy Scouts, the appellate panel said, a private religious school exists mainly to instill its values in young people.

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Gays under threat in Senegal

DAKAR, Senegal — A mob gathered near a mosque outside Dakar. They were there to hunt down and kill nine men accused of homosexual acts.

Earlier this week the nine Senegalese AIDS activists were freed from eight-year-prison terms for alleged homosexual acts, but they went into hiding because of death threats from Muslim religious leaders and the general population.

“The homosexuals will not escape lynching. They will be fish food,” Dakar newspaper L’Observeur quoted a local youth leader as saying.

“Gay men will never be free in Senegal. They expose us all to danger,” said Imam Mbaye Niang, a prominent religious leader and member of parliament. “The judges should understand that Senegalese people need to protect their children, their families from homosexuality.”

In Senegal — where 95 percent of the population is Muslim — homosexual acts are punishable by fines and up to five years in prison. In January, the nine men received the harshest sentence yet for such an offense in Senegal, getting the maximum of five years and an additional three for criminal conspiracy.

Though widely supported in Senegal, the conviction was condemned by international human rights groups and foreign governments, most notably France.

“They were judged and condemned very severely, surely on the basis of public outcry, therefore the justice was neither objective nor founded in law,” said lead defense attorney Barim Sassoum Sy, who called the initial ruling hasty and emotional.

A Dakar appeals court overturned that decision Monday, citing violations of legal protocol.

Acting on an anonymous tip, police had arrested the men — most of whom do HIV prevention work in the “men having sex with men” community — in December at the home of a prominent gay activist. But the police did not have a search warrant, nor did they catch the men in the act, which is required by the Senegalese law prohibiting “indecent acts against nature.” The judge hearing the appeal therefore declared their convictions null and void, Sy said.

Yet even as smiling attorneys and supporters celebrated in the packed courtroom Monday and exchanged congratulations, plans were already in place to get the freed men into hiding outside Dakar.

“The first judge sentenced them to eight years,” said Imam Niang. “He had the courage to say it. The judge that let them go was much less courageous. He yielded to international pressure.”

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Gays under threat in Senegal

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Convictions overturned for Senegal gays

(Dakar) An appeals court in the Senegal capital of Dakar overturned jail sentences Monday for nine men convicted on charges of homosexuality.

They were sentenced in January to eight years in prison on charges of “indecent and unnatural acts” and “forming associations of criminals.”

All nine were involved in HIV-prevention work, their …

Africa Senegal: Court Frees 9 Gay Men

An appeals court on Monday freed nine gay men who had been convicted of “unnatural acts” earlier this year, in a case that drew international condemnation from human rights groups and foreign governments. Senegal, predominantly Muslim, criminalizes homosexuality like dozens of other African nations. The men were arrested in December at the home of a prominent gay activist and sentenced to eight years in prison. See Africa Senegal: Court Frees 9 Gay Men

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Transgender woman wins birth certificate ruling

A 67-year-old Los Angeles native, now living in Kansas, won a state appeals court ruling in San Francisco on Friday that makes it easier for California-born transgender people to change their birth certificate, a document that can be critical in a security-conscious age.

Gigi Marie Somers was born male but has lived most of her life as a woman, and underwent sex-change surgery in 2005. She got a driver’s license with her new name and gender and sought a new birth certificate, but learned that Kansas was one of the few states that will not change a resident’s sex designation on a birth certificate.

Somers then turned to a California court, only to discover that a 1977 state law requires an application for a sex change on a new birth certificate to be filed in the county where the applicant now lives.

But Friday, the First District Court of Appeal said the law violates the rights of someone like Somers to be treated the same as a transgender person who still lives in California.

Any law that penalizes someone for moving to another state restricts the constitutional right to travel and can be justified only if it meets an urgent government need, which doesn’t exist in this case, Justice James Marchiano said in the 3-0 ruling.

For anyone in a similar situation, the case is important because of “the emphasis placed on identity documents in our post-9/11 world,” said attorney Matt Wood of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, which represented Somers.

He said the federal government and employers are increasingly requiring birth certificates or passports to establish the identity of applicants for various programs and jobs.

Legislation that would have the same effect as the court ruling, AB1185 by Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), was introduced in February but hasn’t passed yet, Wood said.

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NYS high court to hear gay benefits challenge

(Albany, New York) The Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York State, has agreed to hear arguments in two cases challenging the recognition of same-sex marriages performed in areas where they are legal.

Both cases were brought by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund which regularly challenges LGBT rights laws …

They hugged! Lesbians expelled from high school

Back in my day, you had to wake up pretty early to get expelled from high school. You had to rise at the crack of dawn and sell drugs to the children of well-connected bankers and lawyers. You had to trudge a mile in the snow to flip off a teacher (like, repeatedly). You had to make some kind of threat, like: I’m going to blow up this stupid school. I think maybe you could also get expelled for wearing shorts above the knee. Such are the baffling, inexplicable rules of high school expulsion.

But even in my conservative Texas high school, you could not be expelled for being a lesbian. Far less for exhibiting “a bond of intimacy” that was “characteristic of a lesbian relationship” — which, by the way, sounds like approximately 86 percent of female friendships. But such was the case in California, where two 16-year-old girls were expelled for “conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians.” An appeals court recently ruled that “the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating,” according to a story in today’s L.A. Times.

The Times story recounts the twisty tale that led a teacher (tipped off by a student) to probe the terrifying waters of MySpace, where she found such incendiary evidence as the fact that one of the students identified as a bisexual. There was also a photo of the two girls hugging. (Hugging?!?! Shouldn’t you get some kind of merit badge for that?) Seriously, the story is worth a read. At one point, the principal seems to be coming on to one girl. The tables keep turning. It’s like “Doubt” or something.

So, OK: It’s a private school that wants to uphold a certain religious ethos. (The school is associated with the same religious denomination as Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann. ) Should they be allowed to discriminate based on their shame-based ethos? I’ll leave that for the courts to decide. (A lawyer for the girls hopes to take the case to the California Supreme Court.) But at a time when our school system is so embattled — fingers crossed, economic stimulus plan — and at an age when kids are discovering themselves and in the very place you might hope adults would be trying to sheperd them into an adult world, it’s just a damn shame that a school would spend its valuable resources on this kind of witch hunt.

― Sarah Hepola See They hugged! Lesbians expelled from high school