Closet Case: How Intolerance Fuels Africa’s AIDS Crisis
New research has challenged the long-standing belief that HIV and AIDS in Africa primarily affect heterosexuals. A study published on the website of the British medical journal Lancet found that men who have sex with other men are up to 10 times more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to be infected with the virus — which suggests that the fight against AIDS on the continent may be undermined by widespread homophobia.
Researchers from Oxford University, the Population Council of Ghana and the Kenya Medical Research Institute reviewed AIDS studies conducted over the past few years and concluded that male-male sex was a major blind spot in AIDS research and policy in Africa. Men having sex with other men is far more common in Africa than is socially acknowledged, owing to widespread hostility toward homosexuality, and the phenomenon there is underreported in research and largely ignored in public-health responses to the pandemic. The researchers compiled statistics from a small but growing number of studies conducted in various African countries in recent years that included estimates of HIV prevalence among men who have sex with other men. (See pictures from Africa’s AIDS crisis.)
See Closet Case: How Intolerance Fuels Africa’s AIDS Crisis
TIME
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Voter ‘animus’ to be issue in Calif marriage case
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that outlawed discrimination protections for gay people, same-sex couples could not enter into civil unions or domestic partnerships anywhere in the nation, much less get married. But as they seek to persuade a federal judge to strike down California’s ban on gay marriages, lawyers for two unmarried gay couples are using that 13-year-old decision as their road map — one they expect will eventually lead the high court to take up the marriage issue. In the Colorado case, Romer v. Evans, the Supreme Court majority held that voters’ dislike of gays and the laws that several cities had approved to shield them from bias motivated the state amendment. Such “animus,” it said, was incompatible with the section of the U.S. Constitution that requires the government to treat its citizens equally absent a compelling reason to do otherwise. The attorneys behind the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 plan to argue during a pretrial hearing Thursday that by stripping gays of the right to wed, the voter-approved ban runs afoul of America’s founding framework in the same way — and for the same reason. “Romer is a strikingly similar situation to what we have here. You had a ballot initiative, a majority vote of the people, taking away a right,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a member of the legal team led by former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson and veteran trial lawyer David Boies. “And there was no justification or rationale other than disapproval by that majority of that group.” U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker on Tuesday issued a tentative order to fast-track the case in his San Francisco court. Among the questions he said he wants covered at trial are whether sexual orientation is unchangeable, if permitting same-sex marriage “destabilizes” traditional unions and whether Proposition 8’s ballot history demonstrates the measure had “discriminatory intent.” California Attorney General Jerry Brown, a defendant in the case, has sided with gay rights advocates and declined to defend the ban, which overturned a California Supreme Court ruling that had legalized same-sex marriages. The state Supreme Court five weeks ago upheld the measure, saying it represented a valid exercise of voters’ authority to amend the California Constitution. Proposition 8’s sponsors, a coalition of religious conservative groups called Protect Marriage, has been given permission to intervene in the federal case. In court papers, the group’s lawyers rejected the assertions that anti-gay attitudes fueled the November measure and that the 1996 Colorado case was applicable. “Nothing in California law, either Proposition 8 or otherwise, indicates that Californians harbor animus towards gay and lesbian individuals,” they wrote. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, attorneys for gay rights and Christian conservative groups have debated whether the Romer decision could be used to expand gay rights. The ruling marked the first time the Supreme Court determined that the Constitution’s equal rights guarantees extended to gays and lesbians. “The basic point of Romer is that government cannot ever act out of hostility toward a group of people, and whether that is in the context of marriage or anti-discrimination law, the point carries over,” said Suzanne Goldberg, who worked on the case and now directs Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Program. The ruling has been cited, though so far unsuccessfully, in past challenges to gay marriage bans in Nebraska and Florida. At the same time, gay rights groups mostly have shied away from pursuing federal marriage cases in favor of pursuing marriage rights in state courts. Legal observers on both sides of the debate agree, however, that California’s Proposition 8 presents novel questions that could make the issue ripe for federal action.
San Francisco Chronicle
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S.F. asks federal judge to toss Prop. 8
San Francisco has asked a federal judge to overturn California’s ban on same-sex marriage, allying the city with a lawsuit that could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
In papers filed Thursday night in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office argued that Proposition 8 was motivated by hatred of gays and lesbians and violates their constitutional right to be free of discrimination.
Although sponsors of the November ballot measure said they were trying to promote traditional marriage and protect children, “excluding same-sex couples from marriage does nothing to advance those goals,” Chief Deputy City Attorney Therese Stewart said in the 49-page brief.
Prop. 8’s “real aim (was) harming gays and lesbians and expressing moral disapproval of them,” Stewart said.
In arguing to throw out Prop. 8, Stewart cited the Supreme Court’s 1996 ruling that struck down Colorado’s ban on state and local gay-rights measures and said a law motivated by hostility toward gays and lesbians is unconstitutional.
See S.F. asks federal judge to toss Prop. 8
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Fresno Hospital Bars Lesbian From Visiting Partner And Giving Advice About Her Treatment, ACLU and NCLR Urge Hospital To Adopt Policies Respecting Same-Sex Relationships
“We just couldn’t believe this was happening to us. This was the nightmare that we hoped we’d never have to live through,” said Teresa Rowe, who grew up in Clovis, California, but now lives in the Bay Area with her partner of four years, Kristin Orbin. “Unfortunately, because Kristin suffers from epilepsy, trips to the hospital are pretty common for us, which is why we filled out the legal paper work to make sure I would be able to be with her and make emergency decisions about her care. But the hospital wouldn’t let me see Kristen and ignored my advice about her treatment. They ended up giving her the exact medication I repeatedly asked them not to give her.”
On May 29, 2009, Rowe and Orbin attended the “Meet in the Middle” rally in support of marriage for same-sex couples in Fresno. After the couple completed a 14-mile march in 90 degree heat, Orbin, who suffers from epilepsy, collapsed in a seizure. The couple experienced hostility from the ambulance driver, but Rowe was ultimately allowed to accompany Orbin to Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno. However, when the couple got the hospital, the driver would not allow Rowe to accompany Orbin into the emergency room even though Orbin had been in and out of consciousness, and Rowe was familiar with her medical history and care.
Rowe repeatedly asked hospital employees to allow her to see Orbin and talk to a physician about her care but was refused. She volunteered to have Orbin’s legal paperwork naming Rowe as her health care agent faxed to the hospital but was told that it wouldn’t do any good. When she asked that she at least be allowed to pass along the message that Orbin not be given the drug Ativan, she was told the message would be conveyed. If the message was given to those treating Orbin, it was ignored because Orbin was given the drug, which she didn’t need and which causes her unnecessary pain. Meanwhile, when she was awake, Orbin was also asking to be allowed to see Rowe. Although they were both told that no visitors were allowed in the area where Orbin was being treated, other patients were receiving guests. After being separated for several hours, Orbin finally saw her doctor. She complained to him, and Rowe was eventually allowed to be with her.
“Until the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, Kristen and Teresa were planning to get married. In this climate, hospitals must be especially diligent to protect same-sex couples from discrimination,” said Elizabeth Gill, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. “As these events so painfully demonstrate, no matter what hoops same-sex couples jump through to protect their relationships, these kinds of horrible things will continue to happen as long as couples are denied the recognition and respect that only comes with marriage.”
The letter sent by the ACLU and NCLR charges that it was a violation of state law for the hospital to discriminate against the couple based on their sexual orientation, as well as to refuse to recognize Rowe’s legal authority, which was authorized by Orbin’s advance health care directive. The letter also notes that hospitals must post and follow a patient’s bill of rights that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and grants patients the ability to designate visitors of their choosing and to decide who is able to make emergency decision about their care. The letter urges Community Medical Centers immediately to affirm their commitment to inclusive and sensitive medical care for LGBT patients, and to take a number of steps to carry out that commitment.
“Discrimination in healthcare settings is still far too common for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people,” said Jason Schneider, MD, President of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA). “No one is served when partners are barred from visitation and kept from participating in conversations about their loved one’s care. It’s bad for doctors who are kept from potentially life threatening information, it’s bad for partners who are left waiting hopelessly in the waiting rooms and it’s especially traumatic for patients who need the love and support that only their partners can provide to help them through health care emergencies.”
A copy of the letter, which gives the hospital until June 22nd to respond, is available at http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/discrim/39854res20090615.html.
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How Far Will Mormons Go to Fight Gay Marriage?
If a gay marriage question is put on the California ballot in 2010, it will put the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at a seriously interesting crossroads.
It has been three or four decades since the Mormon Church chose a low profile in American politics, after its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and theological hostility to black Americans, spurred an anti-Mormon backlash. The Mormons are among the most persecuted of American sects, and highly sensitive to criticism.
The church’s low-key strategy seemed to work. There are still some Mormon-haters in evangelical Christian circles, but for the most part the Mormons are accepted and admired, and church membership has soared. Mormon politicians like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman are regarded by mainstream America as legitimate presidential timber.
Mormon watchers were surprised, then, when the church hierarchy took such an active role in the passage of Proposition 8 in California, limiting marriage to a man and a woman. Gay Americans were surprised as well. They didn’t expect the church to embrace gay marriage, but neither did they predict that the Mormon Church would emerge as a resolute and politically-active foe, whose support for Prop 8 was perhaps determinative. Some of the resultant anti-Mormon rhetoric has been vicious.
Now that Prop 8 has been upheld by the California Supreme Court, gay rights groups say they will put gay marriage on the ballot in California again, and mount a full scale effort to win public approval, perhaps as soon as 2010.
That will put the ball back in the church’s court. The family is at the center of Mormon theology. But the national political trends are running against the church. Younger Americans—even young evangelicals—are more than willing to see their gay friends get married.
Opposing gay marriage in Utah (as the church did in 2004) is one thing, but taking a lead public role in a national campaign to deprive a persecuted minority of a right shared by all other Americans is another. It would be seen as a sign that the days of low-key tactics are over, and that the current Mormon leaders are prepared to give, and get, the political bruising that occurs when religion mixes with politics in America.
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Deb Price: More Republicans embrace gay equality
Rumblings of change are beginning to be heard from deep inside the Republican Party.
The gay Log Cabin Republicans’ recent national convention offered a tantalizing peek at a possible not-so-distant future when the Republican Party has finally — and firmly — turned the corner and embraced equality for gay Americans.
Marquee speakers were Steve Schmidt, former senior campaign strategist for 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, and former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, a founder of the moderate Republican Leadership Council.
Representing the youth vote that will determine the GOP’s fate was Meghan McCain, 24-year-old daughter of Sen. McCain and a contributor at TheDailyBeast.com.
Each supports marriage for same-sex couples.
That puts them firmly in the minority of today’s Republicans, but definitely not of future Republicans if the party is to grow, appeal to young voters, and be competitive beyond the south.
“We were crushed by the Obama campaign with voters under 30,” Schmidt pointed out.
What distinguishes the youth vote, he continued, is “a greater acceptance of people who find happiness in relationships with members of the same sex.” One day, a majority of Americans will follow, and, he added, “sooner or later the Republican Party will catch up.”
Whitman, tackling the problem of broadening the party without scaring away social conservatives, said, “It’s not about saying to the Christian conservatives, ‘There is no place for you.’ It’s about saying, ‘Would you please stop saying there’s no place for us?’”
Afterward, Whitman told me, “It’s not going to threaten my marriage to have a gay couple marry.” She wants the issue out of the party platform.
Meghan McCain was blunter: “Republicans’ using Twitter and Facebook isn’t going to miraculously make people think we’re cool again. Breaking free from obsolete positions and providing real solutions that don’t divide our nation further will.”
It’d be easy to dismiss the trio of speakers as preaching to choir, but encouraging rumblings are coming from elsewhere as well:
Gay Republicans point with pride to the fact that eight Republicans in the Vermont Legislature helped override the governor’s veto of gay marriage.
Meanwhile, gay Iowans are set to begin marrying on Monday, thanks to a ruling written by a Republican appointee. A University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll conducted just before the April 3 unanimous Iowa Supreme Court ruling for gay marriage found that 58 percent of Iowans aged 18 to 29 favor gay marriage, 17 percent prefer civil unions, and only 16 percent oppose both.
That means fewer than one out of five favors the official Republican position.
Contrast that with Iowans 65 or older: 18 percent favor gay marriage, 31 percent civil unions and 42 percent neither.
If you were running a company that hopes to still be around in 20 years, which customers would you appeal to?
That question is being asked in elite Republican circles. In a survey of its Republican political insiders, National Journal magazine found in its most recent issue that only 50 percent think their party should oppose gay marriage, while 8 percent think the party should embrace it and 37 percent say it should steer clear of the issue.
Speaking freely behind the cloak of anonymity, one Republican insider said, “Perception of complete hostility to all gay rights is killing the GOP among voters under 29. Evolve or perish, Republicans.”
A growing number of Republican thinkers are concluding that their party’s future hinges on finding a way to comfortably embrace gay rights.
Reach Deb Price at dprice@detnews.com or (202) 662-8736
See More Republicans embrace gay equality
The Detroit News
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Details in gay student’s slaying are revealed in court documents
Lawrence “Larry” King wasn’t sexually harassing fellow eighth-grade student Brandon McInerney in the weeks leading up to King’s shooting death, prosecutors contend in court documents.
McInerney was the aggressor, teasing the effeminate King for weeks and vowing to “get a gun and shoot” him, according to a prosecution brief. Multiple students provided accounts of a growing hostility between the two boys, the document shows.
Their dispute ended in tragedy a year ago today when McInerney allegedly armed himself with a .22-caliber revolver and shot King in the back of the head twice in an Oxnard classroom as the school day was beginning.
“In the days before the shooting, the defendant tried to enlist others to administer a beating to Larry,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox wrote in a “statement of facts” filed with the brief. “When that failed for lack of interest, he decided to kill Larry.”
Prosecutors said they provided their most detailed account to date of the events leading to the classroom killing to counter the defense’s argument that murder charges against McInerney, then 14, were improperly filed in adult court.
See Details in gay student’s slaying are revealed in court documents
Los Angeles Times, CA -
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Details in gay student’s slaying are revealed in court documents
Lawrence “Larry” King wasn’t sexually harassing fellow eighth-grade student Brandon McInerney in the weeks leading up to King’s shooting death, prosecutors contend in court documents.
McInerney was the aggressor, teasing the effeminate King for weeks and vowing to “get a gun and shoot” him, according to a prosecution brief. Multiple students provided accounts of a growing hostility between the two boys, the document shows.
Their dispute ended in tragedy a year ago today when McInerney allegedly armed himself with a .22-caliber revolver and shot King in the back of the head twice in an Oxnard classroom as the school day was beginning.
“In the days before the shooting, the defendant tried to enlist others to administer a beating to Larry,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox wrote in a “statement of facts” filed with the brief. “When that failed for lack of interest, he decided to kill Larry.”
Prosecutors said they provided their most detailed account to date of the events leading to the classroom killing to counter the defense’s argument that murder charges against McInerney, then 14, were improperly filed in adult court.
See Details in gay student’s slaying are revealed in court documents
Los Angeles Times, CA -
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Sorry, right-wingers, but King David was gay
by Rabbi Ben Kamin, Spiritual Life Examiner
It was years ago that I heard a particularly poignant segment of the Hebrew Scripture chanted in the synagogue—the story, in the Book of Samuel—of the powerful boyhood friendship between Jonathan and David. Jonathan was the emotional son of King Saul; David, the future king, was his companion and fast friend. Their bond, described without restraint in the Bible, was robust: Jonathan declares to David: “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be missed, because your seat will be empty.”
It’s hard to let pass the unfolding passionate relationship between these two young scriptural heroes. The romantic tension they shared was reinforced by the fierce and jealous hostility felt by King Saul against David; the paranoid monarch once even threw a spear at the lad. Jonathan so adored David that he eschewed his role as prince and gave his heart freely to his friend. His father’s disapproval did not repress his loyalty and devotion to his amour.
Granted, there are edicts in the earlier Book of Leviticus forbidding homosexual love; this is what makes the Jonathan-David affair so remarkable. Here is an intense saga of love, rivalry, and Oedipal complexes all being driven by the force of homosexual tenderness. There are deep implications of Jonathan feeling “empty” when David’s chair was vacant.
The Bible does not exactly mince words about the whole thing. In First Samuel, Chapter 20, it describes an outdoor rendezvous between the two boys: “David arose out of the place…and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed three times; and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.”
Until David “exceeded?” This is interpreted by some biblical critics as an explanation of David’s expressive weeping—that is, he ran out of tears. However, the literal translation of the Hebrew is, unequivocally, “until David enlarged.” One can have no illusions what the Bible is describing in this particular instance. See Sorry, right-wingers, but King David was gay
Examiner.com -
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Eight Years After Coming Out as Gay, Hong Suk-chon Is Thriving
“I wanted to publish a book like this to celebrate 10th anniversary of my coming out, but it came a bit earlier than expected,” says actor Hong Suk-chon, celebrating the publication of his book “Design Your Own Restaurant” at “My Song Bar” in Itaewon.
In fact, it has only been eight years since Hong shocked the establishment by becoming the first celebrity to come out as a gay man.
The book, however, celebrates his successful transformation form suddenly-out-of-work actor to restaurateur. “I tried to write about how to make fewer mistakes rather than how to succeed. Because people had misconceptions about me, I endured the tough years with sheer determination.”
Hong, who found himself in a small rented room costing W350,000 (US$1=W1,375) per month eight years ago, has become the owner of restaurants worth W4 billion. First came Italian restaurant “Our Place,” then Thai restaurant “My Thai,” then Thai-Chinese fusion restaurant “My China” and then karaoke and wine place “My Song Bar.”
Hong says he turned to restaurants when his future as an actor began to look insecure. “To me, my restaurants are people. After I came out, I had to endure so much hostility. I missed seeing my friends and my supporters so much at the time. I thought if I open a restaurant, they could come and visit me. That is how I came to open my first restaurant, ‘Our Place.’”
What has it been like for him? “After I set my foot in the entertainment business, I only thought about popularity, money and fame. But I changed a lot after I came out in 2000. I still think it was the right thing to do. I had many difficulties since then, but because I’m an optimistic person, I didn’t run away but squarely faced the world. If I had run away at the time, I don’t think I’d be as happy as I am right now.”
See Eight Years After Coming Out as Gay, Hong Suk-chon Is Thriving
조선일보(영문판), South Korea
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