Global news

FRANK Mugisha, the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award laureate and Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, has blamed meddling evangelicals, mainly from the US, for mounting homophobia in Africa.

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A “backward and bigoted” Catholic Cardinal is being urged to resign after he drew a parallel between gays and the Ku Klux Clan.

Foolish Francis George, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, made the idiotic comparison when he voiced his objection to the timing of the city’s gay pride parade.

Organisers of the parade changed next year’s start-up time from noon to 10 am, meaning it would go past one of the city’s oldest Catholic churches when worshippers were attending Mass.

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A TOTALLY bonkers and near-bankrupt homophobic organisation in the US has published an advert attacking homosexuality in Jamaica.

Exodus international, a fundamentalist Christian outfit which promotes “gay cure” therapies, has taken out an ad in the Trinidad Sunday Express warning of the dangers of homosexuality and saying gays “can change”.

Exodus International says its mission is to “mobilise the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality”.

The advert, according to this report, was funded by an unidentified individual and is similar to one which appeared in the Trinidad Sunday Express entitled “What you should know about homosexuality”.

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THE Pink Triangle Trust and its newly-launched on-line magazine, The Pink Humanist, received international exposure yesterday when the journal’s editor, Barry Duke, was invited to explain the PTT’s objectives on HotMale Radio, based on the Costa Blanca.

The station broadcasts on FM in Spain, and to the rest of the world via the internet, and apart from publicising the PTT, The Pink Humanist and The Freethinker, which he also edits, Duke spent two hours on air with the lovely presenter, Sammy Kruz, speaking about subjects ranging from Humanism and atheism to the pagan origins of Christmas, homophobia, ageism … and keeping fit.

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HOMOPHOBIC violence in Cameroon has reached unprecedented levels, and an on-line petition calling on President Paul Biya to put a halt to these gross abuses of human rights has so far attracted over 68,000 signatures.

The PTT is urging its supporters to sign the petition, and help support Alice N’Kom, pictured below, who is spearheading a campaign to halt Cameroon’s war on homosexuality.

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THE following letter, written by (non-gay) Steuart Campbell of Edinburgh, appeared yesterday in The Scotsman:

The Kirk’s claim (your reports) that the Bible “promoted” (sic, doesn’t it still do so?) heterosexual marriage is both naive and irrelevant. The arcane marriage rules of the ancient Jews are hardly relevant to modern Christians; do men still marry their dead brother’s widow?

More relevant would be Jesus’s own teaching, but unfortunately he was rather vague on the subject. There is no evidence he himself was married (unusual in itself) or that he encouraged marriage. Indeed, questioned by priests on the matter, he appeared to suggest that marriage was irrelevant in the face of resurrection.

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CHANNEL 4’s airing of the docudrama Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker on 21 November marked an early start to the Alan Turing Year, 2012, during which a series of events are planned to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth on 23 June 1912.

The film tells Alan Turing’s story using three interwoven strands. One is the authoritative-sounding voice of an off-screen narrator (spoken by Paul McGann). The second is a series of talking heads – people with a particular insight into some part of Turing’s life or work. The third is a sequence of dramatised interviews between Turing (played by Ed Stoppard) and his psychotherapist Franz Greenbaum (played by Henry Goodman).

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Nikolai Alekseev. Image via YouTube

AFTER Ryazan in 2006 and Arkhangelsk, this autumn the regional parliament of St Petersburg passed a law banning “propaganda of homosexuality, transsexuality and paedophilia” at the Bill’s first reading in mid-November.

This was the first step towards St Petersburg entering the Hall of Shame of the Russian regions which limit a fundamental human right of an individual, the right to freedom of expression.

Introduced by Vladimir Putin’s “United Russia” Party, the Bill had already passed the Parliament’s Legislative Committee, and there is now little chance that anything can stop it. Of course, this bullet against LGBT people is motivated by electoral consideration and must be appreciated in the context of next December’s Parliamentary elections in the country.

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Pink Humanist editor Barry Duke goes for the jugular

In a bizarre, round-about way I learned last month that that the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” never existed until they were invented by a 19th-century writer called Karl-Maria Kertbeny.

I came by this information after receiving a long (3,007-word) email from Christian zealot David Skinner, who is trying – with scant success – to get Britons to boycott the supermarket giant Tesco after it announced that it would be sponsoring World Pride 2012 in London.

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Reacting to Nigeria’s rampant homophobia, Nigerian LGBTIs gathered in London on Novermber 15 to demand the repeal of all anti same-sex laws in that country, and to protest against the anti same-sex marriage Bill.

The protesters, who gathered outside Nigeria House, were joined by international supporters including notable UK Human rights activist, Peter Tatchell.

The protesters carried placards with a variety of slogans: “Kiss Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia Goodbye!” “Proudly Gay, Proudly Nigerian!” “Some Nigerians are Gay, Get over it!” “Sodomy law is a colonial relic, repeal it now!” “Kiss Anti Same Sex marriage bill and Sodomy laws Goodbye!” and “Stop turning us into refugees, Repeal Sodomy laws Now!”.

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