Lesbian sentenced for bigamy in U.K.
A British lesbian convicted of bigamy recently avoided jail time when she was sentenced to an eight-month suspended prison sentence and 100 hours of community service.
Suzanne Mitchell, who had a civil partnership with another woman while still married to a man, is the first woman in British history to be convicted of bigamy.
Mitchell had not sought a divorce when she left her husband and did not tell Caroline Beddows, her same-sex partner, that she had been married before entering into a civil union.
Mitchell’s first marriage was exposed when her relationship soured and Beddows sought to have the partnership officially terminated.
Judge Robin Onions said Mitchell’s failure to tell her partner she was married was the height of “cruelty and deception.”
Britain’s Civil Partnership Act, which went into effect in December 2005, provides all of the rights of marriage but not the name. One of the provisions of the law is that a person entering into a civil partnership not already be married or partnered.
Church joins Stockholm Pride
Stockholm’s gay pride parade on Aug. 5 had Swedish political and church leaders marching in support of the event and drew cheers and applause from thousands of people lining the streets of the capital.
About 30 members of the Swedish Lutheran Church, including the deans of the cathedrals of Stockholm and Uppsala, participated.
The church, which is the largest denomination in the country, issued a statement saying it wanted to “break the masses’ big silence” regarding gays, bisexuals and transsexuals.
Representatives of the governing coalition and major opposition parties in Parliament also marched.
On Aug. 3, Fredrik Reinfeldt became the first serving Swedish prime minister to take part in a pride event when he toured a downtown park during pre-pride activities.
An estimated 50,000 people marched in the parade with another estimated 500,000 lining the streets.
An international study of attitudes towards gays recently found Sweden the most welcoming country for gays. Sweden enacted civil-partnership laws in 1995 giving most of the rights of marriage to registered same-sex couples.
Police shutter AIDS lab
Dominican police recently shut down the laboratory of a prominent psychiatrist who claims he cured more than 50 people of AIDS by injecting them with an unknown substance.
Police raided the lab of José Ramón Báez Acosta on Aug. 1 after receiving complaints from former patients. Samples of the formula, dubbed “Uman TS,” were seized by investigators along with medical equipment, two pigs and a donkey that Báez Acosta was apparently using for testing.
Báez Acosta, who served as mayor of the Dominican capital Santo Domingo in the mid-1960s, recently claimed that he had cured 52 people of AIDS and that God revealed the treatment to him in a dream.
Báez Acosta was not arrested or charged, but prosecutors are investigating him and health officials ordered an immediate stop to the treatment.
An estimated 70,000 of the Dominican Republic’s 9.2 million people are HIV-positive.
Chinese hotels to provide condoms
China recently ordered all hotels, holiday resorts and public showers to provide condoms as part of nationwide efforts to contain the spread of AIDS.
The new regulation, issued by the commerce and health ministries, also requires pamphlets about AIDS prevention to be displayed.
China originally labeled AIDS as a disease that only affected gays, sex workers and drug users in capitalistic Western countries, rarely seen in communist China.
China has also recently opened a new social support center for the gay community in Hong Kong.
S. African HIV rates dropping
According to a government study released Aug. 2, the HIV infection rate is dropping among young pregnant women in South Africa, but is rising for the country’s older women.
A 2006 survey showed the rate of infection fell among pregnant women under 20 from 15.9 percent in 2005 to 13.7 percent last year, and from 30.6 percent to 28 percent in women aged 20-24. In the hardest-hit 25-29-year-old group, it fell from 39.5 percent to 38.7 percent.
However, in the same period, infections among women older than 40 increased from 19.8 percent to 21.3 percent and the overall infection rate among pregnant women in the worst-hit province of KwaZulu-Natal was unchanged at 39.1 percent.
Independent health experts welcomed the drop, but said the statistics may show nothing more than that the epidemic was holding steady, as has been the case for years.
South Africa has an estimated 5.4 million people living with HIV, the second highest after India, which has a much larger population. Last year, an estimated 950 South Africans died each day from AIDS-related diseases and an additional 1,400 were infected each day, according to the Medical Research Council.
Iran bans paper for gay interview
Iran recently shut down a leading moderate newspaper after it published an interview with a homosexual activist on Aug. 5.
Shargh, a newspaper read by Iranian liberals, published a full-page interview with Saghi Ghahreman, an expatriate Iranian poet who lives in Canada, in its Aug. 4 edition.
The paper was banned amid growing pressure on the press in Iran and following the closure of another moderate newspaper, Ham Mihan, in July.
“I have been told that the press watchdog has ordered the ban. We have not been officially notified yet,” said Mehdi Rahmanian, Shargh’s managing director.
“We had an article which was an interview with an expatriate writer. They said she had moral problems, they say she is homosexual and promotes that in her Web log. But we talked to her as a poet,” he added.
“Interviewing an individual cannot be a reason for closure when there is no vice in that interview,” Shargh lawyer Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabai said. “The reason for the ban is unlawful because the judiciary has not protested against the individual who was interviewed.”
Kayhan, a newspaper known for its criticism of the moderate press, claimed Ghahreman was the head “of the Iranian homosexuals organization” and a “counter-revolutionary fugitive.”
Ghahreman made no explicit reference to homosexuality in the interview but said “sexual boundaries must be flexible. The immoral is imposed by culture on the body.”
Homosexuality is illegal in the Islamic republic and homosexual sex is theoretically punishable by death.
Australia attempts to block adoptions
Australia’s government has announced that it is introducing legislation to prohibit foreign children adopted by same-sex couples from entering the country.
Gays and lesbians in Australia frequently go abroad to adopt, with Asian countries being the most popular destinations.
Under the proposed legislation, any child from another country legally adopted by a same-sex couple would not be granted a visa to enter Australia.
Australia’s largest GLBT civil-rights organization has criticized Prime Minister John Howard for supporting the bill.
“For a government to deliberately set out to stigmatize same-sex couples and their children to win a few votes in the lead-up to an election is beneath contempt,” said Rodney Croome, of the Australian Coalition for Equality. “The government clearly believes children are better off in a Chinese orphanage or on the streets of Manila than in the care of a loving same-sex couple in Australia.”
A spokesperson for the attorney general said that the bill, if passed by Parliament, would override laws in Australian states and territories that currently allow gays to adopt overseas.
Nepal discharges lesbian soldiers
The Nepal Army recently dismissed two female soldiers because they were thought to be lesbians.
The soldiers were relieved of duty in mid-July after a court-martial found they “lacked discipline,” army spokesperson Brigadier-General Ramindra Chhetri said.
The two women were caught in bed together. They claimed that they were only reading a book but were court-martialed on charges of being lesbian.
Homosexuality is taboo in Nepal and can be punishable under a law that outlaws “unnatural sex.” Gay activists have accused authorities of harassing homosexuals.
Larry Nichols can be reached at larry@epgn.com.