The Lesbian News Stack 2010 - June 23rd

By maxime68 on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - 22:32

Around the Corner

You might remember that McDonald’s recently started a new publicity campaign in France and that the company received much praise from the LGBT community for one of the commercials. When asked when they were going to air it in the US, McDonald’s stated that they hadn’t any plans to air it and the French gay-friendly ad wasn’t representing the company’s views. As a consequence the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce cut their ties with the company.

John Sheehan is back in the news for (once again) saying some very disturbing things about gays in the army, ending it with

[…] we should not permit openly practicing homosexuals to serve in the U.S. military.

This article was written in collaboration with Tony Perkins, another retired army man, now president of the Family Research Council: “an organization dedicated to the promotion of marriage”. No apologies will help him this time out of the deep cave he’s driving himself into.

Europe

A team of researchers from the university of Berlin is looking for children (aged 8-18) living in rainbow families. The study wants to look into the assumption that children with lesbian, gay or trans parents are having a difficult stand at school with the help of a qualitative study covering Germany, Sweden and Slovenia.

The annual ILGA Conference will be held in The Hague (the Netherlands), from October 28-31, registrations are open until September 11.

Austria

Austrian politicians came up with a yet unheard of argument why artificial insemination should stay forbidden, as it was mentioned explicitly in the still young legislation for civil unions. I can’t believe that any illegal insemination could be punished with a fine of 36.000 € or two weeks in prison, which in my eyes is a clear discrimination.

Back to the arguments; the Austrian Government stated in a recent ruling that a lesbian couple wasn’t really in need of artificial insemination, as they aren’t incapable of reproduction and besides that, an approval would discriminate gay male couples as gays would still not be to able to reproduce even with the help of medically assisted reproduction.

Germany

The May issue of the magazine Familie, Partnerschaft, Recht ("Family, Civil Union, Legislation") focuses on civil unions including comparison of the legal situation in other countries. You can order your copy here.

Iceland

Another piece of news from Iceland that went by almost unnoticed is the change of their IVF treatment law, which is now open to single women, gay and heterosexual couples and is applied to donor eggs and sperm. Similar to the vote on gay marriage no parliamentarian voted against this law.

Ireland

The Irish Supreme Court decided to head in the opposite direction of Iceland when it ruled back in January that the biological father (their words) should have access to the child of a lesbian mother and her partner. The ruling even went that far to use the old – which doesn’t make it right – argument