Lesbian US war deserter wins stay of deportation
(Toronto)Canada’s Federal Court says the country’s refugee board must reconsider the case of a lesbian who deserted the U.S. Army and fled to Canada.
Judge Yves de Montigny said Friday the board erred last February when it rejected Bethany Smith’s bid.
Smith says she fled the army instead of going to Afghanistan …
Tags: Afghanistan, Bethany, De Montigny, Deportation, Deserter, lesbian, Refugee Board, Toronto Canada, U S Army, Wins, YvesGay neo-Nazi film wins top prize
Gay neo-Nazi film wins top prize
Tags: Film Gay, Gay Film, Gay Nazi, Gay Top, Nazi Film, Neo Nazi, Top Gay, WinsPhelps wins free speech victory
Phelps wins free speech victory
Tags: Free Speech Victory, Phelps, WinsPhelps wins free speech victory
Phelps wins free speech victory
Tags: Free Speech Victory, Phelps, WinsGillibrand wins Senate hearing on military policy on gays
New York’s Sen. href=”/topics/Kirsten_Gillibrand”>Kirsten Gillibrand said Monday she had won the commitment of the Senate Armed Services Committee to hold its first hearing this fall on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military.
The announcement is unusual because Gillibrand does not sit on the panel and did not push the issue in the last Congress, when she served on the House Armed Services Committee.
But the agreement by Senate Armed Services chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) capped a campaign Gillibrand has been waging in the last few weeks to scrap or suspend the controversial policy that has led the Pentagon to discharge thousands of gays and lesbians since 1994.
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GLAD wins DOMA passport case
GLAD won a challenge to DOMA and helped a gay man change the name on his passport.
Tags: Doma, Gay Man, Man Change, Passport Case, WinsGLAD wins DOMA passport case
GLAD won a challenge to DOMA and helped a gay man change the name on his passport.
Tags: Doma, Gay Man, Man Change, Passport Case, WinsGay Filipino Wins Asylum Case in Historic Decision New America Media
n a possible precedent-setting case, a gay Filipino man was granted political asylum on May 21, 2009 based on his claim that he would suffer persecution in his homeland for being a homosexual. Immigration Judge Loreto Geisse granted the asylum application of Philip Belarmino, a 43-year-old gay man from the Philippines, preventing him from being deported from the United States.
Immigration law experts generally believe that applications for asylum based on gender are nearly impossible to win. Belarmino also had to overcome the one year statutory bar for the filing of asylum applications from the time of entry in the United States as he filed his application more than one year after his arrival.
Belarmino was represented by Ted Laguatan, a certified immigration law specialist who has won major cases against the U.S. government and corporations not only in immigration law but also in civil cases involving millions of dollars.
Belarmino was an English professor in the Philippines for 17 years prior to his arrival in 2005 on a visitor’s visa. He testified that when he was 9 years old and again when he was 11 years old, he was forced to engage in anal and oral sex by older boys. And at age 16, threatened with a knife, a houseboy forced him to do oral and anal sex at various times. He testified that he did not report these incidents to his parents as he did not want them to know he was gay – which would have traumatized them. See Gay Filipino Wins Asylum Case in Historic Decision
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Gay Filipino professor wins political asylum after revealing a 30-year secret of sexual abuse
After his visitor’s visa expired in 2006, Philip Belarmino, an English professor from the Philippines, consulted a San Francisco attorney. He wanted to see if he could stay longer to be with his parents and sister who are permanent residents in the Bay Area. That bureaucratic immigration path led instead to revelation of a stunning personal secret, recounted during an emotional testimony in an immigration courtroom in San Francisco last month: When he was 9, 11 and 16, Belarmino said he was repeatedly sexually assaulted by other boys. Recounting the abuse, said the 43-year Bay Area resident, was “like forever. It was like re-entering a harrowing, hellish experience.” He feared a forced return to the Philippines, “of being hurled back in the world of cruelty.” That wrenching testimony convinced Judge Loreto Geisse to grant Belarmino political asylum in the United States, ending for now the government’s effort to deport him. The Department of Justice, which has until June 22 to appeal, could not be reached for comment Monday. Political asylum in the United States for gays and lesbians who fear persecution if returned to their home countries is not new and no one knows how many such cases are granted each year. Immigration Equality, a New York City group that advocates for gay and lesbian immigrant rights, won 55 similar cases last year.
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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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