Shlomo Benizri, an Israeli politician from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, has blamed a recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, liberalising laws regarding homosexuality.
Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.
One wonders whether Mr. Benizri’s words have come to the attention of certain political and religious forces in the countries neighbouring Israel, or certain other political and religious forces in Israel’s main supporter, the US. If so, the mind boggles at the possible responses the next time a big one hits either California or Iran.
… Yes, it’s true, Winona was not my first love.
The old teev during the non-ratings season has been a bit of a write off, which in many ways isn’t a bad thing. But I have enjoyed a lot of what SBS has had on (and I’m also pleased to see that the Rudd government is seeking legal advice on the decision to run in-program ads as promised). I could mention some of the Wong Kar-Wai flicks, and many others, but one doco that turned out to be heaps better than I’d anticipated was the one last week on teen movies, partly because it had a lot of interesting talking heads, and partly because it inspired me to go out and rent movies I hadn’t seen for donkey’s years like The Outsiders and remember with what emotional force it struck me way back when (I was a middle class boy going to a working class school, so I was alternately fantasising about being in a John Hughes world and being a “grease”.) It really is amazing to feel exactly how much I did identify with some of the characters and how much I felt - something that’s really very rarely the case now. Perhaps the 80s was something of a golden age for teen cinema, or maybe it’s about the difference between being in your teens and in your thirties.
Anyway, I was kinda struck by two things. Continue reading ‘On falling in love with Ally Sheedy’
This is a guest post by Sam Butler of Queer Penguin
For the purposes of this article, let’s optimistically assume the following: Labor wins this year’s federal election; Labor and the Greens and/or Democrats form a Senate majority; and Labor implements its promises within its first term of office.
Fanciful I know, but necessary for the sake of argument, as it was with such assumptions in mind that Labor recently outlined its GLBTI policy in Sydney to a small but passionate assortment of believers and cynics, organised by the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby and featuring Labor candidates for inner-city seats as well as the party’s would-be Attorney General, Senator Joe Ludwig.
As all speakers went to great lengths to make clear, Labor is a better option than the Howard government where ending legislative discrimination against same-sex couples is concerned. Labor is committed not only to amending the 58 laws identified in HREOC’s Same Sex: Same Entitlements report, but also an even more comprehensive audit of additional laws and departmental policies. Sydney MP Tanya Plibersek and Wentworth candidate George Newhouse articulated a thorough understanding of other key issues concerning GLBTI folk, including domestic violence and the rise of assaults on Oxford Street, with corresponding action plans.
So far, so good. It’s at the next step – formal recognition of same-sex couples – where things get tricky. Continue reading ‘Hard Labor’
SameSame.com.au has announced its list of 25 influential lesbian and gay Australians.
It’s an impressive list and fascinating to read about some of the names I’d never heard of, such as Seven’s Head of Creative Drama and Development, Bevan Lee.
I wish there’d been a higher proportion of women - for starters, Fran Kelly is pretty influential and there’s also NSW MLC Penny Sharpe and poets Dorothy Porter and Jill Jones.
As for Missy Higgins … there’s another thread for that discussion.
Any others who aren’t on that list (and who can be publicly named — please be sensitive)?
Above all, [nice people] keep alive the pleasures of the hunt. In the homogenous population, such as that of the English shire, people are condemned to hunt foxes. This is expensive and sometimes even dangerous - moreover, the fox cannot clearly explain how much he dislikes being hunted. In all these respects the hunting of the human beings is a better sport but if it were not for the nice people it would be difficult to hunt human beings with a good conscience.Those whom the nice people condemn are fair game; at their call of “Tally-Ho”, the hunt assembles and the victim is pursued to prison or death. It is especially good sport when the victim is a woman since this gratifies the jealousy of the women and the sadism of the men.
Bertrand Russell, Nice People, 1931 (Podcast from here)
The hunt is even better sport when there are two victims, both women, both lesbians, and suing their IVF specialist for lumbering them with one child too many. The only thing that detracts from the sport is that the identities of the women in question have been suppressed by court order. Nonetheless, the hounds have caught the scent and they’re in full cry.
Continue reading ‘View Halloo and Tally Ho!’
Samantha Fox is in the country to participate in the latest Countdown potter down memory lane.
Fox was the female who confirmed for a generation of working-class girls that the only way out of the East End was to possess big boobs and a blow wave not unlike Jon Bon Jovi’s.
While Fox’s musical career has mostly been at the bottom of the bargain bin in recent years, she has managed to get some attention for the fact that her lover is a woman.
Continue reading ‘Samantha Fox and her “very close friend”’
I’ve been mulling over the Federal Cabinet’s attitude towards proposals from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for equal treatment under Commonwealth law for same-sex couples.
News.com.au depicted it as a ‘hung Cabinet‘, with John Howard to make the final decision. That’s putting the best possible spin on what looks like a decision not to implement the proposals before the election (if ever). [The Ministers who are so “concerned at the expense of reforms, which would cost taxpayers millions of dollars in extra social security payments” clearly have little concern for the gay and lesbian taxpayers who get no equal return on their taxes.]
Crikey also sees John Howard as being in the hot seat on this issue - apparently he is in favour of the [limited] reforms but has been swayed into inaction by the trenchant opposition of Kevin Andrews and Tony Abbott. Do I need to point out that these two share a religion? Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they share an affiliation with a particular political position within the Church. As Rodney Croome writes, it looks like Australian national policy on same-sex couples is being held hostage by the Vatican, more than by the evangelical Christians who are usually held up as suspects in this matter.
Continue reading ‘Pure discrimination’
PM Howard wants to introduce legislation that would deny entry visas to foreign children adopted by same-sex couples. It appears that this is the response to the successful WA adoption of a child by two men after WA changed its laws regarding adoption by same-sex couples. A federal law would override the various state legislations that have recently changed to allow same-sex adoption.
More marginalising of same-sex attraction, with the result that children who could have had a loving home in our wealthy country will instead remain in orphanages or on the street overseas. The attempted justification by Howard and Ruddock that this law will simply mean that heterosexual couples will be given preference in adopting a limited supply of children totally ignores the facts on the ground: heterosexual couples are already given preference in adopting the very limited supply of healthy infants. Heterosexual couples have far less interest in adopting the children who are not healthy and not infants, and same-sex couples have shown themselves far more willing to adopt these less fashionable adoptees (perhaps purely because of the reality that they’re at the bottom of the list for adopting healthy infants). So Howard and Ruddock are deliberately creating a situation where the children that most heterosexual adoptive couples don’t want anyway now have even less prospect of growing up with love and in comfort.
This press release from the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), dated 21 June 2007, has largely gone off the media radar due to Howard’s Indigenous Emergency plan hogging all the limelight:
Changing the definitions describing de facto relationships in relevant federal laws could help end daily discrimination suffered by more than 20,000 same-sex couples in Australia, according to a report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), tabled in Federal Parliament today.
The Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report, being officially launched in Sydney tomorrow by Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes AM, found that 58 federal laws denied same-sex couples and their children basic financial and work-related entitlements available to opposite-sex couples and their children.
“As one man told us during our Inquiry - same-sex couples are first class tax-payers but second class citizens - and we have certainly found this to be true,�? Mr Innes said.
Continue reading ‘Simple changes could end discrimination for thousands of Australian couples’
The Brisvegas Queer Film Festival is on at the moment. Aside from getting to be in the same spot as just about every single lesbian and queer woman in Brisbane, there are also obviously the delights associated with the re-opening of the Brisbane Powerhouse after its sad absence for six months when the Spark Bar and the performance spaces were being remodelled, rejigged and redecorated. Anyway, that’s by the by.
I went to see Nina’s Heavenly Delights tonight. Being appropriately delighted I retired to a local Indian restaurant - the film features as one of its main plot points the entry of The New Taj (Nina’s family’s Glasgow restaurant) in a Curry Cook Off on Korma TV - very reminiscent of Iron Chef - and you just couldn’t watch so much wonderfully spicy food preparation without wanting to savour some actual spice! The film is just your average Glasgow Bollywood crossover lesbian flick. (Heh.) As formulaic as can be, but it’s fun, and cute, and funny. I was interested to see what people on IMDB and critics had to say about it, not having heard of the film before I saw the BQFF program. I thought it’d be fun when I read the program blurb about it, and I’d see anything starring Laura Fraser.
That subsequent resort to the intertubes is where the story gets interesting. (Does anyone else read online reviews after they’ve seen a film?)
Continue reading ‘Film about Glasgow not as dark as Mike Leigh style flick: shock!’
Andrew Norton has an interesting post up on the successful move by Collingwood gay pub The Peel to apply for an administrative exemption from anti-discrimination laws so as to keep out str8 people and lesbians.
I can understand that bucks and hens’ nights might not go down too well with the vibe of a gay pub, but I was a bit gobsmacked to read the owner’s justification that dykes playing pool frightened some of the gay bois. There’s a lot to sort out here in terms of issues, but I do think that the separatism that may or may not be part of the environing non-str8 culture in Melbourne (I don’t know, so pardon me if the assumption is wrong) is generally something with which I’m unsympathetic. Certainly a number of venues in Brisbane (not at all limited to licensed premises but including cafes and retail shops) in and around the Valley have put a fair bit of effort in since the mid 90s into establishing queer friendly spaces which are also inclusivist - not least because the assumption is that recognition and respect will lead to better attitudes all round and also minimise verbal and physical abuse of same-sex attracted folks. And I venture to suggest the owner’s claim, reinforced by the tribunal, that lesbians have many other venues in which to “express intimacy” is flat out contradicted by experience. If any one is going to be a target for abuse and harrassment by other patrons in most bars, it’s probably going to be lesbians “express(ing) intimacy”. I honestly wonder whether better bouncers and more sensitivity might have solved this problem.
Continue reading ‘No pool for me at The Peel’
Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary has given birth to a son. The baby is shown here with his grandparents. Have you ever seen an official new-baby photo which totally excludes the parents? Imagine if the latest Danish princess had been presented to the world in one photo with the queen and king of Denmark. It wouldn’t have happened — it didn’t happen. It’s only happened in this case because the parents are a lesbian couple.
At least Dick looks genuinely happy.
Possibly because it can’t be spun as a story about TEH EVIL UNION BOSSES or something (or at least not the right kind of story, but more of that later), there’s not much debate around the traps on the ALP conference’s endorsement of a fairly limited form of same sex civil unions along the lines of the Tasmanian legislation.
Andrew Norton has a post examining opposition from SDA head honcho Joe de Bruyn (who Gough Whitlam has described as “a Dutchman who doesn’t like dykes”) in light of some newly available survey data from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005.
Mr de Bruyn’s shop assistant members were 53% in favour, 32% against…
That’s one union boss we can do without in federal politics. All he’s pushing here is his own conservative view of the world, shared not by his membership but by the ex DLP-ers who seemingly put more effort into whipping up a storm about lesbians and IVF or whatever than securing better pay and conditions for people working in retail. Oh, and determining who the next secretary of the ACTU will be.
I read yesterday that one quarter of Australians (or, to be more accurate, one quarter of those surveyed in the Human Beliefs and Values Survey) said they wouldn’t want gay neighbours, according to Love Thy Neighbour: How Much Bigotry is there is Western Countries, a paper interpreting the survey statistics by Brisbane economist John Mangan.
His co-author was Professor Vani Borooah of the University of Ulster - an interesting little irony as the northern Irish topped the list of bigots, with 36 percent not wanting to live next door to homos and 19 percent thinking immigrants and foreign workers weren’t desirable neighbours either.
Now, there are statistics, lies, etcetera, etcetera, and I haven’t read the paper. But as one of the apparently undesirable, I find these results intriguing. It never would have occurred to me that so many of my countrypeople would not want to live next door to me. What intrigues me is exactly what they think would be the problem.
Continue reading ‘(not) Everybody loves good neighbours…’
Published in Apocalypse,
Developing world,
Feminism,
Iraq,
Law,
Lesbian and Gay,
Philosophy,
Politics,
Poverty,
Religion,
USA and
War .
Legislators in Mexico City are moving towards decriminalising abortion.
Scott from Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the central point well:
The key question of abortion policy is always not whether women will get abortions, but whether non-affluent women will have access to safe abortions. It’s strongly in the interests of the forced pregnancy lobby to ignore this reality, because once you do take it into account abortion criminalization is essentially indefensible.
Also interesting, and important, are Amanda’s thoughts at Pandagon, in a post entitled What clinic would Jesus bomb?. She links to some commentary at Feministe.
Not surprisingly, the Church is fighting tooth and nail against the liberalization of abortion laws in Mexico City:
“Catholic leaders and church officials have denounced the proponents as “baby killersâ€? and have warned that the law could provoke violence against doctors who agree to provide the service. A group of Catholic lawyers are pushing for a citywide referendum on the issue, hoping to avert the vote in the city Legislative Assembly.”
Yeah, the law could “provoke� violence. Violence that will just fall out of the sky. I think we’ve seen that it doesn’t take much to prime that particular pump.
Continue reading ‘Thunderbolts from the heavens?’
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