Militias target some Iraqis for being gay
“I’m not a terrorist,” he tells the Iraqi police who surround him. “I want you to know I am different. But I am not a terrorist.”
To some fundamentalist Iraqi Muslims, Ahmed Sadoun Saleh was worse than a terrorist.
He was gay. He wore his hair long and took female hormones to grow breasts. Amused by his appearance, Iraqi police officers stopped him in December at a checkpoint in a southern Baghdad neighborhood dominated by radical Shiite militias. They groped Saleh and ridiculed him.
The assault was captured on video and circulated on cellphones throughout Baghdad, says Ali Hili, founder of London-based Iraqi LGBT, a group dedicated to protecting Iraq’s gays and lesbians. Shortly after the video was made public, Hili says Saleh contacted him, fearing for his life, and asked for his help to flee Iraq.
“Unfortunately, it was too late,” Hili says. Saleh turned up dead two months later, he says.
At least 82 gay men have been killed in Iraq since December, according to Iraqi LGBT. The violence has raised questions about the Iraqi government’s ability to protect a diverse range of vulnerable minority groups that also includes Christians and Kurds, especially following the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities last month.
Mithal al-Alusi, a secular, liberal Sunni legislator, is among those who blame the killings on armed militant groups such as al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Army militia.
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USA Today
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Baby boy for two gay police officers
Two gay police officers have had a baby boy after one of their sisters agreed to act as a surrogate so they could become fathers, it has been revealed.
Lorna Bradley (31) volunteered to have their baby when her brother Steven Ponder (28), a special constable, revealed a desire to start a family with Pc Ivan Sigston (43).
Both men, who live together in Southampton, Hants, were present when mother-of-three Mrs Bradley gave birth to William Campbell Ponder-Sigston last month at her home in Worthing, West Sussex.
Speaking from her terraced property yesterday Mrs Bradley declined to go into detail about the arrangement but said they knew the story might leak out.
She said: “It’s a bit shocking because we didn’t know it was going to be in the paper. We are just thinking about what we are going to do at the moment.
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Another front for fairness
AT A HEARING at the State House last week, supporters of a bill to ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression outlined the myriad barriers that confront transgender people - those who are born male but live as females, or vice versa. Unlike those whose religions or sexual orientations expose them to discrimination, transgendered people might not be able to avoid the issue when applying for jobs, apartments, or loans. The truth may become evident from a check on a Social Security number or a search of credit reports.
Transgender advocates aren’t looking for sympathy. The goal of the legislation, introduced by Representative Carl Sciortino, is to give transgender residents of Massachusetts space to live without discrimination or violence. The bill responds sensibly to a real problem, and deserves to pass.
Transgender people don’t make the transition lightly; many, though not all, undergo gender-reassignment surgery. The case of Dana Zircher, profiled recently by the Globe’s Bella English, underscores the difficulty of the process, even when individuals have supportive families and employers. Zircher, a software designer and a parent, has undergone a divorce, surgery, and 350 hours of electrolysis.
Instead of addressing the complexities of actual people’s lives, though, opponents are trying to undermine Sciortino’s legislation by calling it a “Bathroom Bill.’’ The difference between a transgender woman and a man who wants to infiltrate a ladies’ room is perfectly obvious, at least to anyone who is not deliberately obfuscating the issue. The difference would surely be obvious to police officers and judges. Thirteen other states, including Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island, and dozens of cities, including Boston and Cambridge, already forbid discrimination against transgendered people - and public washrooms are as safe as ever.
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Was This Junior High Student Killed for Being Gay? CBS News
VENTURA, Calif. (CBS/AP) “Tell Larry goodbye because you’re not going to see him again.” That is what 15-year-old Brandon McInerney said a day before he allegedly shot and killed fellow student Larry King, according to police.
Everybody knew who Larry King was at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, Calif. King, fifteen, was open about his sexual orientation and known for his splashy personality and wearing high heels to classes.
On Feb. 12, 2008, King was in the school’s computer lab with 24 other students. Authorities say McInerney, an eighth-grade classmate, walked into the room with a gun and shot King in the head. McInerney ran from the building and police officers detained him a few blocks away. See Was This Junior High Student Killed for Being Gay? CBS News
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A Texas gay raid and Stonewall
The Fort Worth police have “some explaining to do,” said Jacquielynn Floyd in The Dallas Morning News. On June 28, officers raided a gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge, sending a patron to intensive care with a head injury. “In what I can only hope is a spectacularly infelicitous coincidence,” it took place on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Raid, the gay-rights movement’s catalyst. The cops’ story—drunk gay men groped them—doesn’t add up.
Well, police chief Jeff Halstead is backing his men and their classic “Gay Panic Defense,” said Dan Savage in The Stranger, which goes: He made a pass at me, so I was justified in beating/killing him. That would still be illegal, but it’s also bunk. “I’ve been in a million gay bars” like the Rainbow Lounge, and “gay men don’t grope police officers when they enter gay bars.”
It is, “obviously, very sad” that one of the Rainbow Lounge patrons is in critical condition, said Rod Dreher in BeliefNet, but come on, the report that “cops who entered a gay bar were set upon by drunk, horny patrons who played grab-ass with them” is “hilarious,” and not at all far-fetched. Gay people, especially drunk gay people, can be “as stupid as the rest of us.”
Except that the hospitalized man was reportedly drinking bottled water, said Jeff Epperly in New England’s Bay Windows. But 40 years after Stonewall, this kind of gay harassment goes on all over the U.S., not just in Texas. The raid at Forth Worth’s Rainbow Lounge “was the work of a police department that wasn’t smart enough to hide its bigotry.” See A Texas gay raid and Stonewall The Week Magazine
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Bar raid demands independent probe
Don’t expect law enforcement agencies involved in Rainbow Lounge incident to police themselves
It’s not exactly clear how the Fort Worth Police Department and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission will wiggle out of the public relations stranglehold the LGBT community now has on the two agencies, but I know from years of watching these dramas unfold that they will unless there is an independent investigation.
The local police officers and the state agents who descended on the Rainbow Lounge on Sunday morning, June 28, about 1 a.m. — arresting some patrons for public intoxication and apparently seriously injuring one — will all watch each other’s backs.
The official police reports that the law enforcement officials filed following the raid — which ironically occurred on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion and the birth of the gay rights movement in New York City in 1969 — already hold the arresting officers and agents harmless.
The officers and agents claim in the reports that they encountered belligerent drunks in the one-week-old nightclub who threatened them in a sexually suggestive manner. That’s possibly the most preposterous part of the official version of the incident.
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Durbin Admits To Beating Gay Man
WHEELING — James Durbin 38, told Judge Arthur Recht that he beat a 40-year old gay man in the streets of Wheeling. The victim tells 7 News that he called him a faggot just before the brutal beating that left the victim hospitalized with more than 20 stitches, a broken nose and swollen, blood filled eyes.
Police officers who responded to the beating were prepared to testify that they saw Durbin beating the man. However, Durbin’s attorney said there would be no need for the testimony because his client admits to beating the victim while he was out on bond for domestic violence charges.
Durbin allegedly bit his father’s shoulder and allegedly punched his stepmother earlier this year. Judge Recht says the beating violated his terms of bond and he ordered Durbin held in the Northern Regional Jail without bond on all of the charges against him.
Ohio County Prosecutor Shawn Turak says that if Durbin is found guilty on all of the charges he could face life in prison. Prosecutors can not charge him with a hate crime under West Virginia law.
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Peru seeks to ban gay police officers
Peru seeks to ban gay police officers
Tags: Gay Peru, Gay Police, Police OfficersMoscow Police Smother Rally for Gay Rights as It Begins
MOSCOW — Police officers in Moscow quickly suppressed a gay rights demonstration on Saturday, detaining dozens of protesters who hoped to showcase discrimination in Russia ahead of the Eurovision song contest final on Saturday evening.
The approximately 40 people rounded up face misdemeanor charges for trying to hold what a police spokesman, Anatoly Lastovetsky, called “unsanctioned” demonstrations.
Such demonstrations have become an annual headache for the Moscow authorities, who refuse to grant permission to organizers to hold the events despite constitutional guarantees protecting freedom of assembly. At previous gay rights events, police officers have often stood by as neo-fascists and radical Orthodox Christian groups attacked protesters.
While there were no reports of violence on Saturday, the crackdown on this year’s protest could prove an embarrassment as thousands of European visitors enter the city for the Eurovision final, a huge pop music spectacle that Moscow is hosting for the first time after Dima Bilan, a Russian pop star, won last year’s contest in Serbia. See Moscow Police Smother Rally for Gay Rights as It Begins New York Times
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Peru to sack ’scandalous’ gays from police force
(Lima, Peru) Peruvian police officers who “damage the image” of law enforcement by engaging in homosexual behavior can lose their jobs under a new law designed to overhaul an unpopular national police force.
The new law that went into effect Tuesday also says officers will be fired for taking bribes and …
Tags: Bribes, Gays, Homosexual Behavior, Jobs, Law Enforcement, Lima Peru, National Police Force, Peruvian Police, Police Officers
