The Lesbian News Stack 2010 - November 3rd

By maxime68 on Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - 16:50

Get ready for another fresh pile of political news with a focus on European LGBT content and find out why I thought 'If I was to give this week’s LNS edition a color it would be mostly grey with flashing red dots all over it.'

The World

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, reacted on the recent suicides by LGBT teenagers with an article, titled 'How we can fight back against homophobia', in which he addresses the entire world, not only the US. With sentences such as “The first priority is to press for decriminalization of homosexuality worldwide”, this really makes an interesting read.

Around the Corner

Uganda: The Ugandan tabloid that started publishing pictures and names of alleged homosexuals was ordered to shut down by court order.

Around the Corner / Europe

USA/Europe

I guess we’ve grown accustomed having terror-level warnings regularly adjusted, sometimes even reaching the yellow or red level. Otherwise it would be difficult to explain the surprise over the recent package bombs. And while addressees and senders in the US cases are completely different from the European cases, they still have one thing in common – they were all sent via airfreight. This information including details about possible suspects for the US package were quickly distributed, yet it took some time to get known that the destination address was that of an LGBT synagogue. Which sounds quite illogical to me.

Europe

TV-station arte ran a short yet informative spot about gay marriage in Europe, available in French and German.

ILGA-Europe held its annual conference last week in Den Haag (The Hague, the Netherlands), a conference that tackled many topics in various workshops, e.g. 'Homophobia alive and well on European sports scene'. eurOut attended the conference too, look out for some first-hand reports later this week.

Germany

The Bundestag (Parliament, Lower House) rejected a motion by the Greens that asked to end discrimination of income taxes for same-sex couples. While this is not really surprising, it is shocking to see that even gay politicians like Minister of Foreign Affairs Guido Westerwelle voted 'no'. Should you want to address your anger at one specific politician, here’s the list of who voted how on this motion.

France

French Gay Pride marches will use a national motto next year (2011), Coordination InterPride France (CIF) announced.

Italy

Berlusconi is making the news again and not in positive ways. After the latest of his scandals hit the news, he came up with the really original argument that it is better to love beautiful women than being gay. Sooner or later someone will investigate the real scandal behind this story, which is the age of his conquest. It is actually actress Julianne Moore, currently in Italy for the Rome Film Festival, who gave the best comment so far:

'I think it's unfortunate, archaic and idiotic,' she said. 'To hint or to say that there is something wrong with homosexuality... It's embarrassing when people continue to perpetrate these untruths.' She added: 'What children need is two loving parents. It doesn't matter if they are two moms, or two dads, or a mom and a dad.'