Harry's Place

Today people around the world have been marking (or trying to mark) IDAHO, the international day against homophobia.   An LGBT march in Kenya, where homosexuality is a criminal offence, was stopped from going ahead. LGBT protestors in Tbilisi, Georgia, were threatened by Orthodox priests:
Father David, a priest who was one of the organizers of Friday’s [...]

This is a cross-post by Paul Canning

This horrific image, which I make no apologies for posting, comes from the Ugandan Parliament.
The Ugandan lesbian activist Kasha Jacqueline posted it on Twitter. It is an example of the sort of disgusting anti-gay crap being distributed to Ugandan Members of Parliament. Kasha said it left her “sobbing” and pleading [...]

Sarah posted on the hateful words of Timothy Winter and the death-by-torture of three gay youths in South Africa at a “conversion” camp intended to turn them into “men.”
It’s a sign of how far things have come for gays in the US that when NBA basketball player Jason Collins became the first male on a [...]

Often religious figures, when asserting that homosexuality is sinful, contrive to do so in a comparatively soft and reluctant way, perhaps reminding the listener or reader that we all probably fall short of ideal behaviour in some aspect of our lives, and that this particular issue should not be scrutinized disproportionately. Not so the forthright [...]

In a welcome move, the House of Lords has ruled that caste should be deemed a protected characteristic in a new clause in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill.  This follows an earlier defeat for this amendment in the House of Commons. Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, commented:
We are delighted [...]

My first – not to mentioned second and probably third – reaction to the decision earlier this month by the Singaporean judiciary to reject a challenge against Section 377a which criminalized sexual contact between two consenting men was deep disappointment; especially considering growing popular support for its repeal. Dating from British colonial times, it [...]

No surprise to hear this from Turkey’s Islamist PM. Via Gay Star News:
Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called homosexuality a ‘sexual preference’ saying it conflicted with the ‘culture of Islam’.
Erdoğan made these statements during a visit to the Netherlands, where he objected to a lesbian couple adopting a nine-year-old Turkish boy named Yunus.
Quoted by [...]

With the Supreme Court holding a second day of hearings on the question of same-sex marriage, it’s interesting to note the astonishingly fast change of public opinion in the US on the issue.
Even Fox News’s conservative curmudgeon Bill O’Reilly conceded: “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals.”
Ohio’s Republican Senator Rob Portman recently [...]

Hugo Chavez’s anointed successor as president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, will stand for election next month against Henrique Capriles, who lost to the terminally-ill Chavez last October.
Supposedly socialist chavistas attacked Capriles– an unmarried straight Catholic– as a gay Jew.
But Chavez had enough sense not to suggest these things himself– unlike Maduro.
Inaceptables las palabras de [...]

I last mentioned Cardinal Keith O’Brien here when I explained why he had been nominated for Stonewall’s Bigot of the Year award – a contest he later won outright:
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the UK’s most senior Catholic has described gay marriage as a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right” and has campaigned vigorously against [...]