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Gay Marriage Signed Into French Law

Posted on May 18, 2013

File, this April 21, 2013 file image shows demonstrators gathered at the Invalides square in Paris, during a rally to protest against French President Francois Hollande’s social reform on gay marriage and adoption. France’s constitutional council has rejected a challenge by conservative lawmakers to the country’s new gay marriage law, saying the law was constitutional. That means France could see its first gay marriages by the end of May. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

FILE, this May 5, 2013 file image shows anti-gay marriage demonstrators waving flags and holding a placard reading “Dad? Where is Mum?” as they gather in Paris. France’s constitutional council has rejected a challenge by conservative lawmakers to the country’s new gay marriage law, saying the law was constitutional. That means France could see its first gay marriages by the end of May. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

A young woman takes part in a demonstration against same-sex marriage law, in Rennes, western France, Sunday, May 5, 2013. France’s National Assembly approved on April 23, 2013 a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. (AP Photo/David Vincent)

People take part in a demonstration against same-sex marriage law, in Rennes, western France, Sunday, May 5, 2013. France’s National Assembly approved on April 23, 2013 a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. (AP Photo/David Vincent)

A woman shouts during a demonstration against same-sex marriage law, in Rennes, western France, Sunday, May 5, 2013. France’s National Assembly approved on April 23, 2013 a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. (AP Photo/David Vincent)

FILE, this Jan. 27, 2013 file photo, shows two women posing during a demonstration in Paris backing the government project to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption for same-sex couples in Paris. France’s constitutional council has rejected a challenge by conservative lawmakers to the country’s new gay marriage law, saying the law was constitutional. That means France could see its first gay marriages by the end of May. (AP Photo/Benjamin Girette, File)

People gather during a demonstration against same-sex marriage law, in Rennes, western France, Sunday, May 5, 2013. France’s National Assembly approved on April 23, 2013 a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. (AP Photo/David Vincent)

A mother with her son in her arms takes part in a demonstration against same-sex marriage law, in Rennes, western France, Sunday, May 5, 2013. France’s National Assembly approved on April 23, 2013 a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. (AP Photo/David Vincent)

Anti gay marriage activists wave French flags during a rally to protest against French President Francois Hollande’s social reform on gay marriage and adoption, in Lyon, central France, Sunday, May 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

Frigide Barjot leader of the movement against gay marriage, centre, shows a placard as she confronts security staff members during a rally to protest against French President Francois Hollande’s social reform on gay marriage and adoption, in Lyon, central France, Sunday, May 5, 2013. The placard says : civil union = civil scam. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

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Gay Marriage Signed Into French Law

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Brazil judicial panel paves way for gay marriage

Posted on May 16, 2013

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil has taken a big step towards joining Argentina and Uruguay as the first Latin American countries to legalize gay marriage, even though the Brazilian Congress has dragged its feet on the issue.

A panel that oversees the Brazilian judicial system ruled on Tuesday that the country’s notaries public cannot deny marriage licenses to people of the same sex who live together.

The National Council of Justice based its decision on a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that gays in stable relationships should have the same rights as heterosexual couples in terms of retirement benefits, inheritance and alimony.

While Brazil’s judiciary has taken the lead on legalizing same-sex marriage, full recognition will depend on the approval of a gay marriage law by Congress, where a bill has faced opposition from conservative evangelical lawmakers.

Notaries public in 12 of Brazil’s 26 states and its Federal District are already complying with the 2011 ruling officializing gay marriages but often require court orders beforehand, according to a recent survey by O Globo newspaper.

Prior to Tuesday’s ruling, gay couples could be denied marriage certificates because notaries public were not legally bound to marry them, but now notaries can be taken to court for refusing to do so.

The ruling was proposed by the chief justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court, Joaquim Barbosa, who also heads the judicial oversight panel. He said gay couples were a part of Brazil’s social reality and should not be discriminated against.

“Our society is going through many changes and the National Council of Justice should not be indifferent to them,” he said on the council’s website.

According to the last census, there are 60,000 gay couples living together in Brazil.

Gay rights groups welcomed the Brazilian decision and said it added global momentum in favor of gay marriage following the approval of same-sex nuptials in three U.S. states this month.

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Brazil judicial panel paves way for gay marriage

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Illinois Republican Chief Out After Backing Gay Marriage

Posted on May 8, 2013

The chairman of the Illinois Republican Party resigned today, four months after angering conservatives by supporting gay marriage.

The exit of Pat Brady, who had served in the post since 2009, had been expected after he narrowly survived an effort by party officials to oust him in March. His departure comes as the Illinois House of Representatives considers a Senate-passed bill to legalize gay marriage and make the state the first in the Midwest to endorse same-sex unions with a legislative vote.

Brady said in January he was putting his full support behind the bill, saying it strengthens families and reinforces a key Republican value — that the law should treat all citizens equally.

The view put Brady at odds with the partys platform that said marriage should be between a man and a woman only. His statement, which he described as a personal position, provoked an immediate response from gay-marriage opponents, including the National Organization for Marriage, which pledged to defeat any Republican legislator voting for such a law. The group also called Brady unfit to continue as chairman.

In his letter of resignation to the partys State Central Committee, Brady didnt mention gay marriage. He said it was an honor and a privilege to lead the party.

Rhode Island became the 10th U.S. state and the final one in New England to make gay weddings legal, after its House of Representatives passed a bill May 3 expanding marriage rights to homosexuals. Governor Lincoln Chafee, a 60-year-old Republican- turned-independent, had pushed the change since taking office in 2011.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has promised to sign the gay marriage bill if the House sends it to him.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Jones in Chicago at Tjones58@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net

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Illinois Republican Chief Out After Backing Gay Marriage

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France: Battle over gay marriage continues – Video

Posted on April 25, 2013



France: Battle over gay marriage continues
http://www.euronews.com/ It is an issue which has sparked some of the largest protests in the French capital in years. As the National Assembly votes on the gay marriage bill, thoughts in Paris…

By: Euronews

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France: Battle over gay marriage continues – Video

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France legalizes gay marriage after harsh debate

Posted on April 24, 2013

PARIS (AP) France legalized gay marriage on Tuesday after a wrenching national debate that has exposed deep social conservatism in the nation’s heartland and triggered huge protests in Paris from both sides of the divide. Legions of officers with water cannon braced outside the National Assembly for possible violence on an issue that galvanized the country’s faltering right.

The measure passed easily in the Socialist-majority Assembly, 331-225, just minutes after the president of the legislative body expelled a disruptive protester in pink, the color adopted by French opponents of gay marriage.

Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told lawmakers that the first weddings could be as soon as June.

“We believe that the first weddings will be beautiful and that they’ll bring a breeze of joy, and that those who are opposed to them today will surely be confounded when they are overcome with the happiness of the newlyweds and the families,” she said.

As night fell in Paris demonstrations by opponents of the law remained peaceful. Outside the parliament building on Paris’ Left Bank there appeared to be more police than protestors.

Claire Baron, 41, a mother of two, said that she “will oppose the bill until the end.”

“I’ll keep going to the protests, I don’t give in. The bill is not effective yet, the president of the Republic must listen to our voices. We are here to defend family values. Children need a mom and a dad,” Baron said.

In recent weeks, violent attacks against gay couples have spiked and some legislators have received threats including Bartelone, who got a gunpowder-filled envelope on Monday.

One of the biggest protests against same-sex marriage drew together hundreds of thousands of people bused in from the French provinces conservative activists, schoolchildren with their parents, retirees, priests and others. That demonstration ended in blasts of tear gas, as right-wing rabble-rousers, some in masks and hoods, led the charge against police, damaging cars along the Champs-Elysees avenue and making a break for the presidential palace.

Following the vote members of the gay and lesbian community flocked to a square in central Paris, just behind City Hall, to celebrate the vote.

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Examining Gay Marriage, Separating Church And State

Posted on April 21, 2013

Heres how I read the sociocultural tea leaves: If youre fighting in the army thats waging war against gay marriage, or, said another way, if you understand yourself to be fighting to protect and preserve the institution of marriage from being diluted, distorted or otherwise offended by including homosexual partners well, I strongly encourage you to run a white flag up the flagpole right now. Stop the metaphorical scorched earth bombing runs. Give up. Quit.

Because you lost.

Its only a matter of time. America is speaking and has spoken. If I were a betting man, Id put gay marriage right up there next to legalizing marijuana. Its gonna happen. At this point, protesters dont look any less silly than Alabama Gov. George Wallace who, 50 years ago this June, stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to take on the National Guard and a federal court order by shouting into a snowstorm to prevent black people from enrolling at the heretofore all-white school. He then stepped away proudly, having fulfilled his campaign promise to defend our right to be irrelevant.

This is not to say that historical struggles for racial justice are in every way analogous to current struggles for psychosexual identity justice. Nor am I saying that every critical inquiry or protest to gay marriage is evidence of ignorance, prejudice or that tired conversation stopper (cue drum roll) homophobia.

I have critical questions about gay marriage. My concerns have to do with symbols and that which symbols articulate and protect meaning! (see C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, et al.). When symbols devolve or die, meaning is threatened. And when meaning is threatened, human beings feel threatened. Off balance. Unsure. People unwilling to honestly face these uncertainties and insecurities have no other alternative but to behave oddly. Or prejudicially. Or badly. Or violently.

Speaking specifically to Jews, Christians and Muslims , each of these groups trace the symbolic meaning of the word marriage back to the creation stories in Genesis. God creates humankind in Gods image. Male and female did God make Man. The theological conclusion of these religions is that marriage is a symbol and witness to the world of God reconciling the wholeness of Godself in love, fidelity and steadfastness.

Marriage, in these traditions, isnt a container for romance and great sex, though certainly quality marriages grow plenty of both over a lifetime. Rather, theologically understood, marriage is a symbol and a vocation.

I take it as self-evident that men arent women, and women arent men. So, if two women or two men decide to enter upon a life partnership of love and fidelity wrapped in a symbol, and if they call that symbol marriage, then it follows logically that the symbol would have to be in some ways deconstructed and reconstructed.

But, Jews, Christians and Muslims lost the argument the moment their theology got in bed with the U.S. government and the issuance of marriage licenses. In so doing, theological concerns rightly were subordinated to a nation bent on keeping church and state separate. See, seen from a completely secular, objective American viewpoint, my Christian theology of marriage (described above) is nothing more than Stevens religious preference and prejudice. Which hes welcome to have in this country. But hes not welcome to advance his religious worldview onto other Americans, .

If they asked, I would tell the Christians, right now, to radically separate the solemnization of marriage vows from the event of acquiring a marriage license. Then any couple could acquire a marriage license (gay or straight). Couples with marriage licenses could then approach their preferred religious group and seek religious solemnization vows. Individual denominations (Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, etc.) would be free then, to include or exclude any couple (gay or straight) from the marriage symbol (as they understand the meaning thereof.) They would also be free to craft a new, emerging theological understanding of gay life partnership, articulating its own unique witness and vocation in the world.

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Examining Gay Marriage, Separating Church And State

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Students union tosses out Israeli Apartheid Week

Posted on April 15, 2013

Winnipeg Free Press – PRINT EDITION

By: Nick Martin

Posted: 1:00 AM | Comments:

The Winnipeg Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid is threatening to take legal action against the University of Manitoba Students Union for booting the controversial group’s student branch off UMSU-controlled campus property.

“A lot of people are very upset about this,” coalition spokeswoman Liz Carlyle said Sunday. “It’s clearly an attempt to silence criticism of the (Israeli) government.”

On the other hand, B’nai Brith Canada has congratulated UMSU for what the national human rights organization is calling a “first victory” that should be emulated on every university campus in Canada.

The only group not talking, on a formal basis, was UMSU, whose president Bilan Arte has not responded to numerous interview requests since Friday.

Joshua Morry, the commerce students’ rep on the UMSU council, said Sunday he moved the motion passed by a 19-16 margin Thursday night at the UMSU council.

It de-registers Students Against Israeli Apartheid as a student organization, denies it UMSU funding and denies it office and meeting space in UMSU-owned University Centre, Morry said.

Morry said there have been no major incidents at the U of M during annual Israeli Apartheid Week activities held largely in University Centre, but there have been problems elsewhere in Canada.

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Gay Marriage – The 21st Century Revolution?

Posted on April 14, 2013

On Friday, a bill opening marriage and adoption to same-sex couples passed the French Senate, following a week of intense, often acrimonious debate. We simply acknowledge full citizenship for gay couples, said Christine Taubira, the French Minister of Justice, following completion of the controversial vote. The Bill will now return to the National Assembly, which has already approved the proposition, for a second reading, followed by a final reading in the upper house.

Two days earlier in Montevideo, Uruguayan campaigners packed the public seats of the legislative building to watch lawmakers vote in favour of allowing gay marriage by a majority of 71 to 92.

According to Federico Grana, the leader of a gay rights group that drafted the proposal, the vote represented an historic moment” for Uruguay, a country that becomes the third across the American continent, following Canada and, more surprisingly, the deeply Catholic Argentina, to recognise equality in marriage.

Before this week, eleven countries had already passed legislation to allow same-sex marriage, with 10 other states, including Britain and Ireland, currently in the process of pushing through bills.

Although change may appear to be happening at pace, the campaign for gay rights is decades old, with incremental steps leading back to the sixties responsible for the swathe of parliamentary successes currently being celebrated by advocates around the globe.

As human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell told The Huffington Post UK: “Marriage equality is an idea whose time has come. It’s an unstoppable global trend. Its a sentiment BJ Epstein, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia who specialises in queer literature, agrees with.

Governments are starting to look quite ridiculous not giving equal rights to all people and all relationships, she tells The Huffington Post UK. In a few years people are going to wonder why it took such a long time.

But why has it taken such a long time for governments to recognise such a basic principle as equality in marriage for same-sex couples? For Stanislas Kraland, a journalist for the Le Huffington Post who has reported extensively on the gay marriage debate in France, the answer is both generational and political.

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Gay Marriage – The 21st Century Revolution?

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Gay Marriage Bill Approved By French Senate

Posted on April 13, 2013

A gay marriage bill has been passed by the French senate, after more than a week of intense and sometimes acrimonious debate.

The bill opening marriage to gay couples will now return to the National Assembly for a second reading – which is seen as a technicality as MPs already approved the move on February 12.

On Wednesday, ahead of the Senate vote, about 5,000 people took part in a protest in Paris to highlight an increase in homophobic attacks.

Gay rights activists have said reports of verbal and physical assaults on gays have surged amid rabid debate over the same-sex marriage bill.

Elizabeth Ronzier, head of SOS homophobie, said there had been a 30% rise in reports of homophobic and transphobic assaults last year compared to 2011. Reports are said to have noticeably surged when the debate began in the autumn.

“And in the two months to the end of February this year, we received the same amount of testimonies that we would normally get over a period of six months,” she said.

The shocking photo of, Wilfred de Bruijn, who suffered a horrific homophobic attack in Paris, has been used as an emblem for gay rights in France and has come to symbolise the end to five months of bitterly divisive protests.

The anti-gay marriage opposition, supported by the Catholic Church, has already staged marches in the French capital.

During the Senate debate, UMP Senator Charles Revet said: “Marriage is between a man and a woman with a view to procreation. Two men or two women will never be able to have children”

Support for the same-sex marriage bill has been led by president Francois Hollandes Socialist party. Some advocates for the bill have claimed they have been threatened by far-right opponents of the legislation. Socialist senator Esther Benbassa has received threatening phone calls, emails and letters for days and also had her car vandalised.

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Gay Marriage Bill Approved By French Senate

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Poll: 56 Percent Say Constitution Should Determine Gay Marriage

Posted on April 5, 2013

A majority of those polled believe same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal based on the U.S. Constitution, not the states.

Ahead of a pair of upcoming Supreme Court rulings that could impact the right for gay couples to marry, a new survey shows a majority of Americans support a judgment made based on the Constitution rather than allowing states to decide for themselves.

[BROWSE: Political Cartoons on Same-Sex Marriage]

According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 56 percent say same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal based on the U.S. Constitution, compared to 36 percent who disagree. The poll also said 50 percent of voters support allowing gay marriage versus 41 percent who oppose it, a vast difference from a similar poll taken in 2008, when 55 percent of people opposed gay marriage and only 36 percent supported it.

Activists on both sides of the issue said they are confident that Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage would support their position.

“It says to the court right now that America is not 50 separate kingdoms in which every family has to fight for itself, state by state, year by year,” says Evan Wolfson, president of the pro-gay marriage group Freedom to Marry.

“The core argument made on both days by the anti-gay lawyers really boiled down to delay for delay’s sake, ‘hit the pause button,’” he adds. “They didn’t have a real good reason, they just asked the court to take it’s time. The people are saying, ‘No, it’s your job, uphold the Constitution.’”

[PHOTOS: Supreme Court Hears Gay Marriage Arguments]

Frank Schubert, political director for the National Organization for Marriage, a group that opposes gay marriage, expressed equal confidence that a Supreme Court ruling would favor his group’s position.

“NOM believes that there is no right to same-sex marriage in the federal constitution,” he said in an email. “Should the Supreme Court create one, we would favor a national marriage amendment to correct such a ruling.”

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Poll: 56 Percent Say Constitution Should Determine Gay Marriage

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