Gay penguin dads in German zoo hatch their first chick

Z and Vielpunkt, two male Humboldt penguins at Germany’s Bremerhaven Zoo, are the proud new parents of a healthy penguin chick.

“Another couple threw the egg out of their batch. We picked it up and put it in the nest of the gay penguins,” veterinarian Joachim Schöne told the German newspaper Bild of the pair’s entry into parenthood. Z and Vielpunkt faithfully cared for their adopted egg for more than a month; in late April it hatched. Since then, they’ve been taking care of their chick around the clock; it’s still too young to feed itself, so the dads feed him fish mash, Schöne explained.

“Since the chick arrived, they have been behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do,” the zoo said in a statement.

The Bremerhaven Zoo’s same-sex penguin couples (there are three such pairs in residence there, all males) first made news back in 2005, according to the BBC. At the time, the zoo announced plans to “test” the sexual orientations of the six penguins, who’d been seen engaging in mating rituals and trying to incubate rocks as if they were eggs. Gay rights advocates were outraged when the zoo brought four new female penguins into the colony in a bid to encourage the penguins to reproduce, and the zoo later nixed the idea. (In the zoo’s defense, Humboldt penguins are classified as vulnerable to extinction, so it does make a certain amount of sense to be concerned about them reproducing. And since Z and Vielpunkt have done just that, everyone wins!)

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Ruby-Sachs: Chicago Mayor to Appoint a Homophobe

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley

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Chicago Mayor Daley, part of the Daley dynasty that has ruled Chicago on and off for fifty years, has had a hard year. First, his state came under fire for widespread corruption, then his likelycorrupt parking meter privatization scheme caused outrage amongst Chicago residents and now …

Gay community bitterly disappointed by Obama’s lack of action

WASHINGTON — Gays and lesbians voted for President Barack Obama almost en masse after he pledged to be a relentless advocate for their civil rights while making his run for the White House.

But now the disappointment felt among the gay community about Obama’s inaction on issues that include same-sex marriage and the military’s so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is turning into outright anger.

“It’s disgraceful … shame on him,” Kate Waldeck, a 26-year-old medical student in New York City who voted for Obama believing he represented change on issues affecting the community.

The outrage is growing in the aftermath of last week’s California Supreme Court decision to uphold the state’s same-sex marriage ban.

Obama has had nothing to say about the ruling, something that has stung many in the community who had assumed the president might speak out against it and reiterate his commitment to their cause.

“I had sincerely hoped that Obama, both as a liberal and as a minority, might view this issue for what it is: an attempt at decency, and an opportunity to bestow long-deserved freedoms to people who have suffered through abuse and discrimination since the beginning of time,” Waldeck said in a recent interview.

Instead, Waldeck alleges, Obama is “sacrificing our lives to appease people, voters, interest groups, by allowing hate and bias to propagate.”

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NPR Spikes “Outrage” Review For Outing Gay Republicans

NPR has spiked a review of “Outrage” for naming some of the politicians outed in the film.

Citing a policy of protecting the privacy of public figures, an NPR superior cut the names of current Florida governor Charlie Crist and former Senator Larry Craig from the review after writer Nathan Lee and his assigning editor at NPR had agreed on the text of the piece. However, a photo of Larry Craig accompanies the review and says that the former Senator is a subject of the documentary. It also hints strongly at the inclusion of Crist in the doc.

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Violence feared over Moscow gay march

Gay rights activists have warned there could be violence on the streets of the Russian capital Moscow on Saturday as the city stages the Eurovision Song Contest final.

Irina Shipitko (l) and Irina Fedotova’s marriage attempt was rejected

The competition traditionally has a large gay following and Russian activists are trying to hold the country’s first ever gay pride march while thousands of Eurovision fans are in Moscow.

But the city council has refused to give official permission for the march, while allowing hardcore nationalists and religious groups to stage a counter-demonstration on the same day.

Gay activists have come under attack from such groups in the past.

“We will still go ahead”, says Nikolai Alekseev, leader of Russia’s gay rights movement.

“There will be outrage around the world… if on the 16 May people are being arrested and beaten on the streets of Moscow hours before the Eurovision Song Contest final.

“It will be a disgrace for Russia.”

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Anti-gay minister the Rev Ian Watson in ‘Nazi battle’ outrage Times Online

The Church of Scotland is moving towards a schism after one of its ministers compared an increasingly determined campaign against gay clergymen to the war against the Nazis.

The Rev Ian Watson railed against homosexual lifestyles, declaring that such people would not “inherit the kingdom of God” in a sermon that religious leaders and politicians condemned as deeply disturbing.

Mr Watson is a prominent opponent of Scott Rennie, an openly gay minister whose appointment to a parish church last year has caused divisions. Mr Rennie, a divorced father of one, lives with his partner, David, and has the support of his Aberdeen Presbytery. The Church of Scotland is due to debate his appointment at its General Assembly next week after a petition was signed by almost a third of ministers pushing for all gays to be banned from the pulpit.

A motion has been lodged urging the Church not to “train, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and woman”.

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Economist: Is Outing Of Closeted Political Figures A Useful Tactic?

KIRBY DICK’S documentary “Outrage“, which opened nationally last week, has turned gay activists’ controversial tactic of exposing closeted public figures—in this case, closeted Republicans perceived as advancing anti-gay policies in their public lives—into a feature-length film. The movie targets an array of elected officials and prominent GOP operators, but of particular interest is its focus on Charlie Crist (pictured with wife), the governor of Florida, who has thrown his hat into the 2010 race for the US Senate, with the support of much of the party establishment.

As if to confirm the film’s thesis that the press go out of their way to help preserve this sort of charade, National Public Radio opted to edit their reviewer’s piece on the movie to remove the names of politicos identified as closeted. At this point, as several others note, this seems rather quaint—and indeed, like an endorsement of the notion that there’s something especially awful about being accused of being gay. Nor do the network’s protestations that they simply avoid traffic in gossip and rumour hold up: They are only too happy to pass along unconfirmed reports about the sex lives of entertainers.

Which is odd, when you think about it, since while the public is clearly interested in the romances of musicians and movie stars, it’s hard to claim there’s a genuine public interest served by poking into their private lives. When it comes to public servants, however, we generally accept that it’s perfectly legitimate to scrutinise their private conduct to the extent it’s relevant to assessing the sincerity of their professed beliefs or the veracity of their public personas. Usually the controversy over “outing” has to do not with elected officials, but with high-level staffers, who have not volunteered themselves for scrutiny in the same way as political candidates. In practice legislative directors and analysts too yield significant public power—legislators are important people, and can’t be bothered with writing and reading bills themselves—but “Outrage” limits itself to indisputable public figures. If the claims about them are so poorly sourced as to constitute plain slander, the film shouldn’t be rewarded with any kind of attention; if they’re at least credible, one may as well save the listeners a Google search and say what they are.

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Taking aim at the hypocrisy of closeted politicians

Does a politician’s right to privacy trump the wrong of hypocrisy? Documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick thinks not.
He doesn’t care about the sex lives of politicians. But he cares that when a pol’s sexual orientation is secret, often shame and self-hatred color his voting record. Dick is outraged when closeted gay politicians vote against gay marriage, against the right of gays to adopt, and against funding for HIV/AIDS. He’s so outraged that he has made a movie exposing the disconnect between what these men practice and what they preach.
Despite its title, Outrage is calm, riveting, and provocative, taking pride in officials who come out and and taking aim at those who remain closeted. The film saves most of its ammunition for the media’s “orchestrated conspiracy,” creating a double bind that perpetuates the double lives of these men. Yes, they are all men, and with the exception of Ed Koch, former New York mayor, all are Republicans. (Why should we care? One, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who recently married a woman, is a leading GOP candidate for president in 2012.)
Dick, whose prior documentaries include This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a trenchant and amusing take on the double standard of the motion-picture ratings board, is ambivalent about his role in “outing” closeted politicians.
Beltway blogger Michael Rogers, on hand to furnish color commentary on who’s in the closet and why, considers the question of whether outing is a form of sexual McCarthyism. Is it the closeted practice or the outing that perpetuates the climate of shame? Certainly, whenever a James McGreevey or Eliot Spitzer admits his hidden sexual practices, he must take the media walk of shame.
Rogers’ answer to the chicken-or-egg question is that the goal of outing is to expose political hypocrisy, not sexual orientation. To this end, Dick provides each closeted politician’s voting record on gay rights; most of them show that he is voting against his own self-interest. See Taking aim at the hypocrisy of closeted politicians Philadelphia Inquirer * Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

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‘Outrage’ comes at pivotal moment in gay rights fight

“Outrage,” the biting new political documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick that opens today in Los Angeles, candidly explores the murky intersection between private lives and public conduct.Dick’s thesis is that Washington’s closeted homosexual lawmakers, most of them members of the GOP, staunchly — often stridently — oppose equal rights measures for gays because they’re anxious to conceal their own sexual orientation. He also shares a sentiment voiced by openly gay Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts who told the filmmakers that his Republican colleagues have “a right to privacy, but there’s no right to hypocrisy.”So in that spirit, the film does what no mainstream cinematic treatment of this issue has done before: It names names.

All the law and policymakers identified have previously been “outed” in print or online, but most either deny being gay or simply decline to comment on privacy grounds. Among those named in “Outrage” are veteran California Rep. David Dreier, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, ex-Louisiana Congressman Jim McCrery, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch and ex-Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, whose notorious 2007 arrest on suspicion of lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room effectively ended his political career.

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‘They kill people like us,’ says gay Iraqi

BAGHDAD – Widespread violence is down across Baghdad, but not for one minority group.

Iraq’s gay population is being targeted by militia groups in a wave of killings that has claimed the lives of up to 25 young men and boys in the past month.

“They know I am gay. I don’t know if I am going to be killed, this is up to God,” said Moyad, a 38-year-old Baghdad resident who would not give his last name out of fear for his safety.

Visibly frightened, he said that he has many friends who have been sadistically tortured, some even murdered. “They are sticking glue up their anuses; some hospitals refuse to treat them. Is it a war waged against homosexuals?” he asked.

International outrage
Most of the attacks have happened in Baghdad’s Shia neighborhoods, and many believe that religious leaders have used Friday sermons in Sadr City as a platform to incite hatred and violence toward homosexuals. The bodies of three gay men were reported to have been found in Sadr City in April with pieces of paper bearing the word for “pervert” attached to them.

Posters and leaflets have been distributed in the Baghdad neighborhoods of al-Shola, al-Hurya and Sadr City with orders to, “Cleanse Iraq from the crime of homosexuality.”

Baghdad police didn’t respond to inquiries from NBC News about the attacks, but the surge in violence has gained attention by the international media.