Homosexualidad (Continuación)

MundoAmérica, ,

A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted the Obama administration’s emergency request for a stay against a lower court order lifting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring openly gay service members.

The decision will strike some people as odd, since popular belief holds that the president, who has said he opposes the law, can make the policy go away by simply letting the lower court order stand. In fact, the administration is required to comply with the law and defend it in court, regardless of Mr. Obama’s personal views.

Fortunately, there is another, seemingly contradictory step the White House could take that would not only make its position clear, but deal a significant blow to the law’s prospects: while continuing to appeal the ruling, the administration could inform the courts that it believes “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

Cuando era un muchacho, en el colegio de los frailes en donde fui adoctrinado, memorizábamos la lista de los actos que "claman venganza a Dios". En el segundo puesto de aquel palmarés de la infamia figuraba el "pecado impuro contra naturaleza", simbolizado en el fuego divino que arrasó a las ciudades malditas a orillas del Mar Muerto.

Hoy, este tipo de fábulas hacen reír a quienes sabemos que dicha venganza diezmaría las filas del clero y que, privada de infinidad de sus hijos, la pobre Iglesia no podría levantar cabeza después de semejante escabechina.

Pero el mismo discurso apocalíptico se esgrime ahora en el campo del islamismo radical y amenaza extenderse al ámbito de quienes, víctimas de la pobreza e ignorancia en la que se hallan sumidos numerosos pueblos musulmanes, buscan un responsable a los males que les afectan.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

It's Pride season in Europe and the Americas. It's a time to celebrate the huge achievements that have and are being made in terms of LGBT rights across this part of world. In Syria, however, things have taken a recent turn for the worse.

Since late March, police have conducted a series of raids on private parties and meeting places, and more than 25 men have been arrested. The arrests are shrouded in secrecy but some information has leaked out.

At the Gay Middle East news website (GME) we have received several testimonies and published two reports from undercover sources in Damascus.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaSocial

El llamado día del Orgullo Gay (Gay Pride) conmemora una fecha reciente dentro de la rica historia cultural de los homosexuales. Pero conmemora, con razón, un 28 de junio de 1969, en que los gays de Nueva York se rebelaron contra la opresión y el oscurantismo y abrieron los modernos logros -en muchos países del mundo occidental- de la visibilidad y de la libertad hoy conseguidos, con altos grados de lucha y sacrificio. Por eso, porque el Día del Orgullo Gay es, ante todo, una celebración de la libertad y más particularmente de la tan denostada libertad sexual (que las religiones más cerradas nunca han entendido) resulta raro que se haya mantenido el veto institucional a Israel en el gran desfile de Madrid -convertido por su amplitud en un referente nacional e internacional-.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote a letter last month urging Congress to delay legislation that would end the "don't ask, don't tell" ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military until after Dec. 1, when the results of a 10-month Pentagon working-group review are due. While the request is reasonable, it is the military that will pay the highest price if Congress does not act now.

"Don't ask, don't tell" is both a federal law and a Pentagon policy. The law ties the military's hands on this issue. If Congress fails to repeal it, the Pentagon's study process will be compromised because the Defense Department will not have the authority to implement its own recommendations.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

The centre of Minsk, capital of Belarus, is blocked for at least 15 minutes, then four cars with the Belarusian national flag as licence plates sweep past. A young guy next to me is calling his mum to tell her that he is so excited and just saw with his own eyes the bulletproof car of Alexander Lukashenko, sometimes described as Europe's last dictator.

Just over a week ago, the Belarusian leader was sent a letter asking him to authorise Slavic gay pride this coming weekend. So far, there has been no response.

Lukashenko's undemocratic rule has been marred by controversial elections, suppression of political opposition, prosecution of human rights activists and opposition figures, media control, and so on.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica,

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity -- or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

When the Pentagon's top brass announced last week that they no longer believe military unit cohesion suffers from the presence of openly gay men or women in the ranks, they effectively transformed a policy question into a legal one, to which the answer is clear: Congress can no longer mandate discrimination in the armed forces on the basis of sexual orientation.

In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law criminalizing same-gender sexual relations, reasoning that such conduct was part of a constitutionally protected liberty interest. The court also suggested that the Texas statute was vulnerable to challenge as a denial of equal protection of the laws.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

The election, two months ago, of the Rev. Mary Glasspool, a priest who has been in a committed relationship with another woman for more than 20 years, as a suffragan (assistant) bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, has brought added turmoil to the Episcopal Church in the United States and to the worldwide Anglican Communion. There has been sporadic schism since the regular ordination of women as priests in 1977 and especially since the election of the Rev. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. He is the first openly gay bishop in the history of those Christian bishops — Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Greek and Russian Orthodox among them — who trace their succession back to the apostles.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

The Post asked pollsters and others to explain the politics of changing the ban on gays serving openly. Below are responses from Scott Keeter, Ed Rogers, Dan Schnur, Michael Buonocore, Douglas E. Schoen and Sue Fulton.

By Scott Keeter, Director of survey research at the Pew Research Center.

Support for allowing gays to serve openly in the military has been stable for several years and is significantly higher in many polls than it was when President Bill Clinton raised the issue in the 1990s. When the Pew Research Center asked about this issue last March, we found 59 percent saying they favored "allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military."…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalIglesia Católica,

The election of Canon Mary D Glasspool as an Anglican bishop in the diocese of Los Angeles has been slated by some, praised by others. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wants Episcopal church leaders to block her appointment, and has warned of "very important implications" if they do not. But to Giles Fraser, "This is another nail in the coffin of Christian homophobia."

Along with Canon Diane Bruce, she has been chosen as a suffragan (assistant) bishop in the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles. In some ways, Glasspool is an unsurprising choice, a gifted parish priest now in the senior clergy team supporting churches across Maryland.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

In the slow-moving train crash of international Anglicanism, a decision taken in California has finally brought a large coach off the rails altogether. The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States has voted decisively to allow in principle the appointment, to all orders of ministry, of persons in active same-sex relationships. This marks a clear break with the rest of the Anglican Communion.

Both the bishops and deputies (lay and clergy) of TEC knew exactly what they were doing. They were telling the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other “instruments of communion” that they were ignoring their plea for a moratorium on consecrating practising homosexuals as bishops.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

It is good news that those Anglican parishes that are strongly opposed to homosexuality are forming a new movement. The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) was launched last year as a pressure group within the international Anglican communion, but only now is it trying to exert grassroots influence, raising awareness for its cause on the parish level. If it is successful, then it will be easy to identify the sexual politics of your local parish church. It will be impossible to deny that there is a church within the church, that division has become schism.

This is good news because honesty is better than dishonesty.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

I was born on the day of the Stonewall riots, June 27, 1969, so my life is an individual history of the 40-year-old modern gay rights movement. What makes my story particularly representative is just how conventional my life has become.

I grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. My parents were liberal college professors, but I was aware in high school -- in the 1980s, when AIDS had no treatment and hatred for gays reached a fever pitch -- that they wanted both of their boys to be heterosexual. Logically, it seemed to be the only path to a happy, successful life.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York when, for the first time in history, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people fought back against ­decades of police harassment.

Previously, LGBT people worldwide had largely complied with arrest and criminalisation. But not in New York on the nights of 27 and 28 June 1969. What began as a routine police raid on a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, turned into sporadic street battles. In the aftermath of this history-making queer resistance, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed in New York and similar groups sprang up across the US and the world.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

I was perhaps the unlikeliest person in the world to cover the Stonewall riots for The Village Voice. It was June 27, 1969. I had graduated from West Point only three weeks earlier and was spending my summer leave in New York before reporting for duty at Fort Benning, in Georgia. After a late dinner in Chinatown, I was about to enter the Lion’s Head, a writers’ hangout on Christopher Street near the Voice’s offices, when I blundered straight into the first moments of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar a couple of doors down the street.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

I was 19 years old when I met Craig Rodwell. He was 26. It was just after Thanksgiving in 1967, shortly after he’d opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer Street near the New York University campus.

One day in the shop — considered to be the first literary gay bookstore — the beat cop stopped by to tell us we needed to pay him off each week. Craig told him we wouldn’t pay; a few days later we had a break-in and the cash box was taken. For Craig, it was an opportunity to make the connection between police corruption and prejudice, a topic that he would bring up time after time in the shop’s newsletter, “The Hymnal.”…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaAspectos GeneralesInternacionalIglesia Católica,

El Parlamento belga solicitó al Gobierno de su país que condenara las declaraciones del Papa contra los preservativos como remedio para combatir la pandemia del sida en África y que elevara una protesta oficial ante la Santa Sede por tan graves declaraciones de una personalidad tan influyente en el terreno religioso y moral. Una abrumadora mayoría de parlamentarios aprobaron la protesta, que el embajador de Bélgica envió al Vaticano. La reacción de la jerarquía católica belga no fue inculpatoria del Papa, pero tampoco exculpatoria. El arzobispo de Bruselas, Godfried Daneels, una de las personalidades más respetadas del catolicismo actual por su actitud reformista frente al integrismo reinante, ha cuestionado en repetidas ocasiones la doctrina oficial del Vaticano contra el preservativo.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

With the nation engaged in two wars and facing a number of potential adversaries, this is no time to weaken our military. Yet if gay rights activists and their allies have their way, grave harm will soon be inflicted on our all-volunteer force.

The administration and some in Congress have pledged to repeal Section 654 of U.S. Code Title 10, which states that homosexuals are not eligible for military service. Often confused with the "don't ask, don't tell" regulations issued by President Bill Clinton, this statute establishes several reasons that homosexuality is incompatible with military service.

Section 654 recognizes that the military is a "specialized society" that is "fundamentally different from civilian life."…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalIglesia Católica

Hace algunos siglos, la Iglesia dirigía su atención al problema, diríase poético, del sexo de los ángeles. ¿Tiene hoy Benedicto XVI algún problema con el sexo de los mortales?

Nadie en su sano juicio espera que el Papa aliente la libertad sexual de los gays y las lesbianas, se sienta cómodo con los travestis o firme un manifiesto en favor del Orgullo Gay. No obstante, su toma de posiciones sobre estos asuntos, unas ampliamente difundidas, otras prácticamente desapercibidas, dan que pensar.

El reciente llamamiento del Vaticano a boicotear la despenalización universal de la homosexualidad propuesta el 18 de diciembre por 66 países es clara en su argumentación.…  Seguir leyendo »