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Another Victory for the LGBT Community: Gay Marriage Ruled Constitutional in France

Another Victory for the LGBT Community: Gay Marriage Ruled Constitutional in France

 

 
France’s constitutional council today rejected a challenge by conservative legislators to the country’s new gay marriage law, claiming the law was constitutional. This ruling means the nation of France could see its first gay marriages commence by the end of this month.
 
The nation’s parliament passed the law legalizing gay marriage last month after a heated national debate. Opponents of gay marriage, including the prominent UMP party, immediately contested the law in France’s Constitutional Council. 
 
The gay marriage law is set to be published in the official journal; President Francois Hollande, who promised to legalize gay marriage during his campaign last year, has pledged to see the law published as quickly as the legislative process allows. 
When signed, France will become the 14th county to legalize same-sex marriage, joining a group of eight other European nations: Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Denmark, and Iceland. 
 
The bill was approved on the 23rd of April by parliament, but was promptly challenged on constitutional grounds by the right-wing UMP party of former leader Nicolas Sarkozy. The conservative party opposed what it felt was a fast-track voting process and argued that homosexual marriage represented a fundamental change that could not be justified by merely passing a law. 
 
The UMP party has not made clear whether it aims to strike the law down if it comes to fruition. Several media outlets in France have reported that some prominent party members believe that such a route would be legally plausible. 
 
Harlem Desir, the head of the ruling Socialist Party, claimed the passing of the law “marks a victory for the nation and for equality; it is day of great pride for the Socialist movement.”
 
 
Source: Human Rights Campaign

Terrible Act: Crowd Led by Priests Attacks Gay Rights Marchers in the Nation of Georgia

Terrible Act: Crowd Led by Priests Attacks Gay Rights Marchers in the Nation of Georgia

 

 
A massive group of thousands led by priests in black robes stormed through police barriers in downtown Tbilisi, Georgia last week and attacked a group of 50 or so gay rights demonstrators. 
 
Carrying banners reading “no to gays,” and “no to mental genocide,” the masses of mostly young men hurled eggs and rocks at the gay rights supporters. The police forced most of the demonstrators onto minibuses to evacuate them from the rally; however, the attackers swarmed the buses, and attempted to shatter the windows with trash cans, metal gratings, and rocks. 
 
At least a dozen people were hospitalized, including three police offers and up to nine gay rights marchers.
 
“The rioters wanted to kill us all,” said the head of the Tbilisi-based gay rights advocacy group that organized the march. A lawyer for the gay rights group claimed that if the marchers and supporters had not been close to the buses when the clash began, the rioters would have turned every gay rights supporter into a “corpse.”
 
Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili of Georgia spoke strongly against the violence in a news release last week, as the police urged the rioters to leave the city’s central avenue. 
 
This attack comes amid an increase in anti-gay rhetoric and sentiment in Georgia and Russia, whose Orthodox churches are gaining more and more political influence. 
In a statement released last week, the leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church compared homosexuals to drug addicts and called the march a “violation of the rights of the majority.”
 
Conservative-minded citizens of Georgia traveled from other cities to speak against the gay rights marchers, and one told a media station that she had come to “cure them of their illness.”
 
“We are attempting to protect our orthodoxy, and prohibit anyone from wiping their feet on our faith,” said a member of the church. “We must not allow these individuals to hold a gay demonstration here.”
 
 
Source: Human Rights Campaign

Going Backwards: Nigerian Lawmakers Vote to Outlaw Gay Marriage

Going Backwards: Nigerian Lawmakers Vote to Outlaw Gay Marriage

 
Nigerian lawmakers approved a bill today that outlaws gay marriage and significantly hampers gay rights, including placing criminal penalties on public displays of affection between homosexual couples. 
 
The Nigerian House of Representatives unanimously approved the measure which provides lengthy jail terms of up to 14 years for homosexual marriage. 
 
A subsequent bill was also approved by the Senate, but it has not been made clear if the two laws are identical. If the two bills are virtually the same, the bill will now go to the President for his final approval. 
 
Under the new bill, “individuals that entered into a same-sex marriage or civil union will be found guilty of an offense and will be jointly held liable on conviction to a term of 14 years in prison.”
 
Beyond concerns about gay rights in Nigeria, some prominent legislators have wondered whether funding delivered through non-government organizations in the nation for AIDS and HIV treatment would be jeopardized by the passing of the bill. 
Leaders and lawyers for various human rights groups claim that the passing of this bill is simply a publicity stunt or a sign of legislative showmanship due to the fact that homosexual couples have never approached any government office or registrar asking to be married in the nation of Nigeria. 
 
Many of those connected to the bill argue that Nigerian politicians are likely seeking to defy the mounting Western pressure over homosexual rights. 
 
British Prime Minister David Cameron issued a warning that his nation will consider withholding aid from countries that do not fundamentally recognize gay rights. The United States has also expressed significant concern over the Nigerian legislation. 
Last year, President Barack Obama ordered all public agencies that play a role in foreign policy to encourage foreign nations to place a premium on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights. 
 
The nation of Nigeria is a highly religious society, with its 160 million people divided in half between Muslims and Christians. 
 
 
Source: Human Rights Campaign

Gay Marriage Bill Temporarily Falters in Illinois

Gay Marriage Bill Temporarily Falters in Illinois

For supporters of gay marriage in the state of Illinois, this moment was supposed to a landmark time in a collective “I do” from state legislators.

Thousands participated on social media and live streams throughout the day on Friday of last week, sending messages and tweets of hope as they anxiously waited for the House to undergo a vote on the legalization of same-sex marriage. Homosexual couples who had traveled to the Capitol were invited to view the vote from the speaker’s gallery, and during breaks, families snapped pictures with sponsoring lawmaker Greg Harris.

However, as the hours passed, the energy and optimism faded away due to strong opposition from the Catholic Church and conservative African-American church groups, leading Harris to announce that he would not address the bill as a result of a lack of support.

“It felt like someone punched me to the floor,” said Robyne O’Mara who has been involved in a same-sex relationship for the past 30 years and took off work to witness the vote.

The state had appeared ready to become the 13th state to approve same-sex marriage. Governor Pat Quinn guaranteed residents to sign the bill, and Democrats held veto-proof majorities in the Senate and House. Moreover, President Obama called for its passage during a fundraiser in his home city, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also expressed support.

As anticipation mounted on Friday, so too did lobbying efforts from Harris and his fellow democrats. Harris spent several hours going desk to desk to gauge interest among his colleagues, occasionally going as far as holding meetings and huddling on the floor with various senators and House Speaker Michael Madigan.

In the end; however, Harris declined to blame any group of lawmakers for failing to proceed with a  vote, claiming individual members should make up their own mind and that several of his colleagues had asked to have the summer to contemplate the issue in their district, with the promise they would vote to pass the bill in November.

“This was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life,” said Harris of the decision to postpone the vote.

According to the bill, the definition of marriage in the state would change from an act between a man and a woman to one between two people. Moreover, the bill would convert civil unions into marriages within a year of the law being affirmed. Also, the legislation would not require religious groups to perform a gay marriage, and church officials would not be required to open their facilities to homosexual couples looking to marry.

This push for gay marriages comes just two years after the state legalized civil unions for homosexual couples and reflects shifting attitudes in favor of gay marriage. 

 

Source: Human Rights Campaign

Mark another One Down: Republican Senator Mark Kirk Announces Support for Gay Marriage

Mark another One Down: Republican Senator Mark Kirk Announces Support for Gay Marriage

 

Mark another One Down: Republican Senator Mark Kirk Announces Support for Gay Marriage
 
Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois announced today that he supports gay marriage. The announcement makes Kirk the second sitting Republican senator to affirm support for same-sex marriage. 
 
Senator Kirk, who previously opposed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, said in a post on his website “gay couples should be given the right to civil marriage.”
 
“Our time on this planet is limited, I know this better than most,” said Kirk, who survived a stroke in January of 2012. “Life ultimately comes down to who you love and who loves you back, and the United States government has no place in the middle.”
 
Kirk was required to go through months of rehabilitation before returning to the nation’s capital earlier this year. Kirk, through his posting, said that when he went back to the Senate he promised he would return “with an open mind and a greater respect for people.”
 
Kirk is the ranking Republican lawmaker in the state of Illinois, and his announcement comes less than one month after Senator Rob Portman of Ohio became the first conservative Senator to support gay marriage and one week after the United States Supreme Court held two days of arguments on the subject. 
 
The announcement also comes as the Illinois Legislature is giving consideration to a measure that would make Illinois the 10th state in the U.S. to allow same-sex marriage. 
 
The state senate voted in February to lift a ban on Illinois same-sex marriage; this legislation was then approved by a House committee, but has yet to be brought to the floor for a formal vote. House Speaker Michael Madigan believes that supporters are a dozen or so votes short the required mark to pass the bill. That said, Governor Pat Quinn announces that she would sign the measure if approved on the floor. 
Kirk’s announcement could offer political cover to the Republican party in the Illinois House who are for the first time considering a yes vote but remain fearful of a backlash from the conservative base. 
 
Senator Kirk served five terms in Congress representing Chicago’s northern suburbs before he secured the Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. 
 
Source: whitehouse.gov

Enjoy your Stay: Thousands Await Putin’s visit to Amsterdam to Protest the President’s Position on Gay Rights

Enjoy your Stay: Thousands Await Putin’s visit to Amsterdam to Protest the President’s Position on Gay Rights

 

 
Over 3,000 people gathered in Amsterdam to protest Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit on Monday. The throng of gay rights activists and supporters flew rainbow flags at half-mast around the city that prides itself on expression and enjoying every kind of freedom. 
 
The cheerfully dressed crowd constantly chanted “Go home Putting!” during a festive protest outside the museum where Putin enjoyed dinner with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. 
 
Amsterdam in 2001 became the first nation to legalize gay marriage. 
Protesters were primarily targeting a bill before the Russian parliament that outlaws homosexual “propaganda” among minors, but also a broad rights clampdown in the nation of Russia, where Putin is serving his third term as president. 
 
Western governments and activists have expressed considerable anger over the measure, which imposes fines of up to 500,000 rubles (roughly $15,850) for any “public acts” that promote homosexuality or pedophilia. 
 
“The law does not impose violations on the rights of sexual minorities in our nation,” said a defiant Putin. “These people enjoy full liberties and rights like everyone else in Russia.”
 
Putin went onto say that gay couples could not produce children and that “Russia and Europe have demographic problems.”
 
“We need to reach a majority with this community; we need to work collectively and not insult each other.”
 
Dozens of police units were deployed in the highly secured area, including anti-riot forces. Dutch police reported that they had briefly detained one individual, a gay activist who wrote expletives against the Russian President on the window of his Amsterdam studio. 
 
Putin’s visit centered on trade negotiations with the Netherlands; many business leaders traveled with Putin discuss trade deals. 
 
Russia and The Netherlands have a detailed trade relationship as many Russian companies are registered in The Netherlands because of its favorable tax regime. 
 
Source: CNN

Federal Folly: Federal Reserve Gaffs and Releases Minutes Early

Federal Folly: Federal Reserve Gaffs and Releases Minutes Early

 

 
The Federal Reserve typically releases minutes from its 2pm meetings; however, it was forced to put the minutes out five hours early on Wednesday after learning that some people inadvertently received the minutes on Tuesday. 
 
The Federal Reserve accidently emailed the minutes from its March meeting to approximately 100 people a day early. While no major announcements were expected to come from the minutes, they are nevertheless viewed as a primary document that can move markets and influence politics. Wall Street analysts and players often delve deep into the minutes for clues about when the central bank may cut back on its bond-buying policy or hike-up interest rates.  
 
For this reason, the minutes are typically protected by the central bank and their release is supposed to be executed in a precise manner. A spokesman for the Fed told various news outlets that the mistake was entirely accidental and it can be chalked up to a human error. The 100 or so individuals on the list included mostly Congressional employees and employees of trade organizations. These individuals received the minutes shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday. 
 
After noticing the error this morning, the United States Federal Reserve decided to release the minutes to the public at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. It is currently not clear whether any trading took place based on the premature release, but the Reserve Board’s Inspector General will conduct an investigation regarding the error. 
The minutes contained very little information regarding expected Fed policy. The primary takeaway from the release is that most Fed members think the central bank should keep buying $85 billion in assets a month, at least until the midway point of this year. 
 
The Fed’s current policy includes purchasing $45 billion in treasuries and $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities each month; the primary intent is to lower long-term interesting rates. That said, the program, which is regarded as quantitative easing, is viewing by some as the primary reason why the S&P 500 and the Dow are at record highs. 
 
The central bank continues to keep short-term interest rates close to zero to further boost the economy. The Fed announced it plans to keep the interest rate near zero until the unemployment rate dips below 6.5 percent or inflation exceeds 2.5 percent a year. The bulk of Fed officials do not expect this to happen until at least 2015. 
 
Source: AP
 

Taking the Magnifying Glass to Obama’s Budget

Taking the Magnifying Glass to Obama’s Budget

 

 
President Obama’s $3.77 trillion budget proposal for 2014 calls for long-term changes to Social Security and Medicare in hopes of reducing the deficit by $1.8 trillion over the next decade.
 
The budget’s blueprint, which has already drawn criticism from both the right and left, offers changes to Social Security and Medicare. The budget also includes tax increases that would hit high-income corporations and homes. 
 
The Obama budget also calls for greater spending on infrastructure, nondefense research and early childhood education programs. These investments would be funded by other measures to avoid further adding to the deficit. 
 
“Debate in Washington has raged between reducing our deficits and making investments needed to grow our economy. My budget answers this argument; we can grow our economy, and reduce our deficits,” said the President. 
 
President Obama’s budget was released with a delay, coming after the House and Senate each passed separate and different 2014 budget frameworks. 
 
While the proposal is not expected to fly on Capitol Hill, Obama’s budget sets a powerful marker for continuing debt talks with lawmakers. 
 
President Obama’s budget calls for a $50 billion investment to repair bridges, highways, airports and transit systems. The budget would also create a National Infrastructure Bank to merge public and private capital for noteworthy projects.
 
Obama has already faced heavy criticism from the left for supporting a switch to a chained CPI measure, which is a new way to track inflation to ultimately reduce federal spending by slowing the growth in federal benefits which are adjusted each year for cost of living purposes. Obama’s budget; however, calls for ways to compensate low-income veterans and recipients of Supplemental Security Income. 
 
By 2020, the use of the chained CPI measure would yield an average tax increase of $311 among the 80 percent of homes that would see a tax increase. 
 
Among the President’s new tax measures, Obama plans to place a cap on the tax-advantaged portion of a person’s savings across tax-preferred retirement accounts, such as IRAs. 
 
The President’s debt reduction proposal comes from an offer he made to House Speaker John Boehner during last year’s fiscal cliff talks. The proposal, if accepted, would replace the automatic budget cuts, which took effect last month.  
 
 
Source: whitehouse.gov

Unbreakable: Cyber Attacks can’t Break the Internet

Unbreakable: Cyber Attacks can’t Break the Internet

 

 
A recent wave of tremendous cyber-attacks has proven it is possible to bend, but not shatter the Internet. 
 
It is easy for a virus to take down a website; attack methods known as “distributed denials of service” enable cybercriminals to direct considerable amounts of traffic to a website to overwhelm its servers and render the site unreachable. Government websites, banks and financial exchanges have been commonly targeted venues for distributed denial of service attacks. 
 
However last month, European spam-prevention service Spamhaus was rocked by the largest known cyber-attack in history causing Internet speeds to slow throughout large chunks of Europe. The attackers utilized nearly 100,000 servers to transmit 300 gigabits of traffic per second during the breach. The attack was more than three times larger than the Iranian-sponsored cyber-attacks of September 2012, which impeded access to some American banks’ websites for days. 
 
Yet many experts contend that the entire Internet cannot just be flipped on or off like a simple light switch. “The infrastructure of the Internet is highly robust and designed to guarantee reliable traffic at a high quality of service,” said Dr. Schneck, chief technology officer at Intel’s Internet security division. 
 
Despite the relative ease of taking down individual websites, it would be particularly difficult to sustain a widespread level of attack for a lengthy period of time, let alone a continuous flow of traffic that would exceed the limits of Internet service providers. 
The Internet is also too widely distributed to fall victim to a widespread attack. There have numerous occasions when regional access to the Internet was disrupted, either by attacks on vital services, accidental cable cutting, or a government-run utility limiting or shutting off access. Yet the Internet continued to work for billions of people outside of those regions. 
 
In the United States, a number of redundancies are built into the Internet; if one or two avenues are disrupted from your local network to the Internet, you likely won’t even notice a hitch. 
 
Another reason why the Internet is impossible to take down: cyber attackers depend on the Internet to operate. “The Internet is what the attackers need to deliver their attack,” said Gavin Reed, the director of engineering and products for Cisco. “I suppose it is possible for an attack to be large enough to destroy large chunks of the Internet, but we have not seen that happen.” 
 
Only government bodies have the ability to grind the entire Internet to a halt for a sustained period of time. So even as cyber-attacks increase in frequency and size, cyber criminals will never be able to take down the entire Internet. 
 
Source: whitehouse.gov
 

Ongoing Battle for Justice and Equality in New York State

Ongoing Battle for Justice and Equality in New York State

 

 
As the battle for the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act heats up in the state of New York, two prominent members of the Trans Rights Coalition have launched powerful media campaigns to educate New York residents about discrimination on the basis of expression and gender identity. 
 
The New York State Pride Agenda movement—often known as the Empire State Pride Agenda Campaign—has been broadcasting a radio spot in a number of media markets throughout the state. These advertisements serve as a reminder to listeners that New York employees should be judged on their accomplishments and merits, and not on the basis of their expression or gender identity. The Human Rights Campaign issued a simply statement to back the initiative of the Empire State Pride Agenda campaign, by saying “nobody deserves to be fired from their job or not hired for an employment opportunity because of who they are.”
 
Housing works has issued several postcards that illustrate the struggles that transgender New Yorkers face on a day to day basis. Housing works also explains on its webpage why the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act is such a critical piece of legislation to an initiative whose mission is related to the homelessness and HIV populations. 
 
Both campaigns draw attention to the prominence of New York State passing the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act this legislative session. This piece of legislation would prohibit discrimination against transgender people in employment, education, housing, credit and public accommodations. The state of New York protects lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. 
 
The Human Rights Campaign claims that it is time for the state of New York to close the gap and guarantee that transgender individuals are afforded the same vital anti-discrimination protections that are provided to the rest of the population. Currently sixteen states, Washington D.C., and 166 cities and towns in the United States institute similar laws, including Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Suffolk County, Rochester, and Tompkins County in the state of New York.  
 
 
Source: Human Rights Campaign
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