Northern Territory MP Chansey Paech has become the first openly gay Indigenous speaker of an Australianparliament in a landmark move.
Paech took over the role of speaker from Kezia Purick, who resigned earlier this week after an independent report alleged corrupt practices.
A Labor Party MP for Namatjira, Paech was previously deputy speaker in the parliament before his appointment this week.
He told ABC News that it was an honour to be elected speaker, which is the parliament’s most senior role.
Aboriginal Speaker Chansey Paech says his appointment sends ‘a strong message’ to young people.
“It sends a strong message for our young kids, growing up, you have to believe in yourself and know that these are options for you in the future.”
Another Aboriginal MP, Ngaree Ah Kit, has been elected as deputy speaker of the parliament – which makes it the first time in history two Indigenous people have held the senior positions in a parliament.
It sends a strong message for our young kids, growing up, you have to believe in yourself and know that these are options for you in the future.
Tweeting about the milestone, Paech said: “The Northern Territory has many things to be proud of and today we add to that list! We’re officially the first parliament in Australia to have an Aboriginal speaker and deputy speaker.”
Getting to this point was no easy feat for the politician. Following his election in 2016, Paech told Buzzfeed that he faced smear campaigns from opponents who tried to convince Aboriginal voters to not support him because of his sexuality.
Voters did not respond well to a smear campaign based on his sexuality.
“That kind of language the electorate didn’t respond well to.
“The most beautiful thing was when I was at a remote community [campaigning] and people said to me, ‘They said you were a gay and we said we didn’t care, we just want houses,’”
“I will stand proud with my Labor colleagues across our vast lands to ensure that all Territorians have equality and that we reach a time when our first Australians are constitutionally recognised,” he said.
Following his election in 2016, Paech delivered a rousing speech in parliament calling for equality for all.
“I am eternally proud of who I am and where I come from. I own it and wear it with pride,” he said at the time.
“Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them.” Reads the first lines of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the ban on discrimination that protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees. There is no doubt that this decision opens up the legal system for a new era of trans rights. However, two years ago in Latin America a major initiative undertaken by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights passed almost unnoticed. More than unexpected consequences, that 2018 ruling is showing today its consequent and symbolic impact.
It may be seen as a small gesture in a region where some advocates claim that the life expectancy of trans women is less than half than of the rest of the population. But in that 2018 ruling the Inter-American Court of Human Rights banned all forms of discrimination on grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation. Deriving its power as the final interpreter of the meaning of the American Convention on Human Rights, the court has its seat in a quiet suburb of Costa Rica’s capital, San José. The ruling is binding in over 20 Latin American countries that fall under the court’s jurisdiction. The gesture is small. The consequences deriving from it, increasingly, are not.
On trans rights, the terrain in Latin American seems even trickier. In the most violent region of the world, trans individuals are disproportionality affected. Violence has its seeds in a culture of widespread discrimination against non-binary individuals. Civil society organizations claim that only one in two trans persons have access to health care. Institutional policies are also rooted in hetero-cis-normative paradigms. The Inter-American Court’s decision challenged that institutionalized discrimination. Altogether with a ruling on a general ban against discrimination on grounds of gender identity, it also focused on the right to identity. The court’s groundbreaking decision considered that trans individuals have the right to have their gender identity officially recognized as they perceive it. In practice, it means that Latin American states have the obligation to update their documents without any invasive procedures, such as a probe of medical treatment, clinical tests or a physician’s certification. The only important requirement is that the official documents mirror the person’s self-perceived identity. Under the sponsorship of the Organization of American States (OAS), the umbrella organization under which the Inter-American Court was created, civil registries all around the region are working on adopting its practices and legislation to comply with the court’s mandate.
These are reasons to be optimistic. Still, there are reasons to be cautious. The political context in Latin American is as complex as in the U.S. today. All major initiatives always will still require many more small gestures. At least this time, the law is on the right side of history.
Councilman Ritchie Torres broke out to an early lead Tuesday night in the hotly contested battle for an open Bronx congressional seat, as the openly gay city lawmaker appeared to turn away a challenge from one of New York’s most high-profile conservative politicians.
Torres led the crowded field to replace retiring Rep. Jose Serrano (D-Bronx) with 30 percent of the votes cast during early voting and Primary Day, according to returns from 61 percent of precincts. Assemblyman Michael Blake (D-The Bronx) was in second place with 18 percent.
Councilman Ruben Diaz Sr., a conservative firebrand and minister best known for making homophobic statements, trailed in third place with just 15 percent of the vote.
The final result won’t be official for another week as most people voted by absentee ballot. Still, this is very encouraging. As you can see in the clip below, Diaz was in rather a foul mood last night. Bronx United, a coalition formed to oppose Diaz, has already declared him the loser, snarkily using Diaz’s standard “you should know” opening to all of his press releases.
Beginning today, June 1, we mark LGBTQ+ Pride month in Marin County and globally. It is a critical time to recall the origins of the movement for our hard fought rights – a movement that has achieved massive advances for our community, but which still has far to go. We have achieved things it was difficult to imagine just two decades ago: the ability to marry whomever we love, much broader public support for the idea that LGBTQ+ people deserve equal rights and dignity, and representation of our stories and identities in the media. But we still lack basic protections against discrimination in housing and employment at the federal level, and the Electoral College chose a president who regularly wages attacks on LGBTQ+ people.
The movement for LGBTQ+ civil rights was definitively sparked with a furious riot at the Stonewall Inn. Led by Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson and Latinx trans activist Sylvia Rivera, the Stonewall Riotfollowed major demonstrations at the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles, and Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco where transgender activists of color stood on the front lines against police harassment and violence. Queer and trans people of color have stood up time and time again for our community to say: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! We now see queer Black activists responding to the state of emergency that has resulted from countless murders of Black people across the country and the world. Two out of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Alicia Garza, are queer. Protests – even riots – have been an effective tool in enacting real change.
The first Pride events in the country were actually protests. In recent years, they have looked more like wild parties. But underneath, they are critical tools in our efforts to achieve our full civil rights agenda. As friends at Equality California said so well in a communication today, “Pride is Protest!” How, then, should we think of Pride this year? This month? And this day? A celebration? No. Time for reflection and action, yes! No one is truly free until ALL of us are free and valued and live with dignity and respect. Although the initial fights for LGBTQ+ rights were fought by trans activists of color, they are still the ones experiencing major discrimination and bias. LGBTQ+ people of color have called attention to racism and rejection that exists within our OWN community – and their righteous calls for greater inclusion have often been met with deaf ears. This is unacceptable.
What does this mean for The Spahr Center? We recognize that we have work to do to better serve queer and trans people of color in Marin, and to fight for the well-being of ALL LGBTQ+ people in the county. In 2017, Marin County was named the most racially inequitable county in California. We know that a majority of the clients served in our LGBTQ+ programs are white, and only our HIV program mirrors the county’s diversity. We are committed to prioritizing racial equity in our work moving forward. Here are some initial steps we are taking:
We are reaching out to organizations across the county learning how we can better serve communities of color and be in solidarity with their work;
We are launching a summer social justice fellowship for LGBTQ+ young people to learn about the intersectional nature of oppression and take action to make change in Marin;
We are prioritizing hiring therapists of color and seeking a bilingual Spanish-speaking therapist; and
We are planning a town hall with partners in the County to discuss the intersection of racism, homophobia and transphobia.
We urge our community, especially our White community members, to join us in this work. It is our duty to take action to protect Black lives and dismantle the structures that oppress people of color.
As Marsha P. Johnson said, “No Pride for some of us, without liberation for all of us!
Meet (virtually) and Spend Time With Our Amazing Prevention Director,Lorie Violette
Hear all about the work that Lorie and her team have been doing since SIP, how they have successfully opened up the office adhering to new guidelines in order to provide essential services to our clients. There’s no messing around when Lorie is around!
The four justices appointed by Democratic presidents were joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee. Within two years, more than 150,000 same-sex couples got married. According to U.S. Census estimates, there are more than 500,000 married same-sex couples in the country.
The impact of those unions has been more than cultural. Same-sex weddings have generated more than $3 billion over the past five years, the Williams Institute study estimates, which also said the weddings have generated some $244 million in state and local taxes and created nearly 50,000 jobs.
The 5-4 Supreme Court ruling has been pelted by countless other minor challenges, but so far, none has seriously threatened it. In fact, earlier this month the high court ruled in Bostick v. Clayton County that employers couldn’t fire workers simply for being gay or transgendered.
In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans supported the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. By 2015, decades of activism, visibility, and engagement had grown that to a 63 percent majority.
Gallup confirmed this month that support has continued to grow and broaden. Today at least two-thirds of all Americans are in favor of marriage equality, including 83 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents, and even a 49 percent plurality of Republicans.
As recently as 1996, at the time of the world’s first-ever freedom to marry victory in Hawaii, there were zero states, zero countries in the world, where loving and committed same-sex couples could marry. As of last month’s win in Costa Rica, there are now 29 freedom to marry countries, representing more than 1.1 billion people.
In July 2013, Jim Obergefell married his longtime partner in love, John Arthur, who was gravely ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Because Ohio at the time didn’t allow same-sex unions, the couple flew to Maryland to exchange vows.
Arthur died of the disease three months later, and Obergefell sued to be listed on the death certificate as Arthur’s husband. That case was one of six argued together before the high court. Obergefell was the lead plaintiff, meaning the case bore his name, though he was joined by dozens of other plaintiffs.
The whirlwind of that suit meant Obergefell was never alone with his thoughts. But as the focus has shifted to other minority groups, he’s had time to learn that, contrary to the self-help books, grief does not come in clean stages. “That implies it’s the same for every person, and it isn’t,” he said. “I’m still grieving, I’m still processing.”
Five years ago in June, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to strike down all same-sex marriage bans. Of the four cases, [Michigan Attorney General Dana] Nessel asserts, DeBoer was most significant, which is why it rankles her that the landmark is known as Obergefell v. Hodgesbecause of a quirk in the order in which the appeals were filed. “To my dying day, this will make me bitter,” she says.
“We were the only case that was truly just about the right to marry your same-sex partner. We were the only ones who tried the case. We put in more in terms of blood, sweat, and tears than anybody else. April and Jayne should have been synonymous with that case. If you read the opinion, the justices mostly talk about April and Jayne’s case. Ultimately, from an historical perspective, honestly, April and Jayne got robbed.”
The US Marine Corps has released a statement celebrating Pride month and a decade since the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and one officer is on a mission to shut down homophobes who disagree.
The Marine Corps released a statement in support of its LGBT+ members at the beginning of Pride month, which said: “During [Pride] month, we take the opportunity to recognise our LGBT service members and reflect upon the past.
“We celebrate their successes and recognise the contributions they have brought to our Corps.
“This year we celebrate the ten year anniversary of the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ .”
It added: “Commanders and leaders are encouraged to take time to recognise the 2020 LGBT Pride Month, and promote participation in observance events throughout their local communities.”
However, the statement went largely unnoticed until it was posted on Facebook by the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina.
The post quickly amassed more than 2,000 comments, and while a lot were supportive, many others were severely offended by the celebration of LGBT+ marines.
This year we celebrate the ten year anniversary of the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. The Marine Corps takes pride in…
One man wrote: “Never thought I’d see this BS…I’m all for doing your own thing, but for it to be celebrated… wtf, over!”
Luckily, Chief Warrant Officer (CWO) Bobby Yarbrough, who conducts communication, strategy and operations for the Marine Corps, was there to shut down the homophobes.
In a response, Yarbrough wrote: “We also celebrate Black History Month, Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Month of the Military Child, etc. Should we stop celebrating those too?”
Another anti-LGBT+ commenter wrote: “What in the heck is this about? Is this what the Corps is coming to? A social experiment?”
Yarbrough swooped in again, responding: “Nope. We still fight wars. Some of our warfighters are LGBT. We like them to know we support them.”
When another commented that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell worked just fine”, the CWO hit back: “I would imagine all the LGBT [people] that was kicked out of service would disagree. No heterosexuals were kicked out due to sexuality.
“The policy was terrible and needed to go away.”
A more positive commenter told Yarbrough: “Sir, may I please have your command photo so I may turn it into a candle and place next to my Joe Exotic one?
What’s so bad about a rainbow burrito? If you’ve been following the rift in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement over the corporate embrace of Pride, the question may have crossed your mind. Last June, the West Village was a labyrinth of rainbows, with every bank branch and Shake Shack festooned with messaging for Pride Month. Chipotle sold limited-edition Pride merch, including tank tops with a rainbow burrito and the slogan “¿Homo Estas?” The hoopla—always big, but this time bigger—marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and culminated in the annual NYC Pride March, which drew some five million revellers and boasted sponsors including MasterCard, Macy’s, Uber, and Diet Coke.
Amid the festivities, a group of activists staged an alternative: the inaugural Queer Liberation March—a smaller, rawer, more radical cousin to the established parade. In spirit it was closer to the roots of the Pride March, which was originally called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, and began, in 1970, to mark the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The new march even re-created the original route, from Greenwich Village up to Central Park. There were no branded floats, no police contingent, no corporate funding. “One of our mottoes was ‘We’re here for queer liberation, not rainbow capitalism,’ ” one of the organizers, Natalie James, said recently. The group is now planning a second annual march, which will take place Sunday, while the main Pride March has been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic—meaning that, by happenstance, the upstart march has usurped the Goliath in the space of a year, just in time to draw on a renewed spirit of spontaneous protest.
The critique that Pride marches have become corporatized and depoliticized has been building for years, part of a perennial tension in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement between assimilation and radicalism. “A lot of longtime activists had just stopped going to Pride,” another organizer, Jay W. Walker, said. “They were kind of sickened by it.” He brought up the concept of pinkwashing, in which “corporate bad actors” use a show of acceptance to buy good will while distracting from less savory practices. For instance, Walker mentioned Wells Fargo, which has had floats in Pride marches for years while maintaining (until recently) financial ties with the National Rifle Association, which opposed gun-control measures after the Pulse night-club shooting, in 2016. “A big part of our issue with the corporations is they’re not consistent in their support for us throughout the year,” Francesca Barjon, the group’s twenty-four-year-old social-media organizer, said. “It’s about being able to profit off of us in June.”
Cathy Renna, a NYC Pride spokesperson, countered, “We’re so far past that with these corporations. They know they gotta do better than that. This is not about waving a rainbow flag in June in your window.” The Chipotle merch, for example, benefitted the Trevor Project, which provides services to queer youth. “It’s really easy for Pride to be a target, because Pride is something that everybody has some sense of ownership in,” Renna said, adding, of the breakout march, “If we’re going to continue to make the kind of progress that we want to make, I think it’s important that we not—I’m trying to think of a way to say this that’s family-friendly—crap on each other, because some people like to do things differently.”
The Queer Liberation March had its roots in the 2017 Pride March, which featured the disruptive début of the Resistance Contingent, a consortium of activist groups that formed in response to the Trump Administration. It included groups such as Gays Against Guns, which staged a die-in, and Hoods4Justice, which formed a blockade to prevent the N.Y.P.D. marching band from joining the parade, with banners reading “There are no queer friendly cops” and “Decolonize pride.” A dozen people were arrested. During the planning for the Pride March in 2018, Heritage of Pride, the organization that produces New York’s Pride events, tried “dissolving” the Resistance Contingent, James said. It was eventually reinstated, but the activists were disillusioned with what the march had become. “We realized we all were very dissatisfied with the event itself, the degree of corporate floats, the corporatization, the bank sponsorship, as well as having a fully uniformed police contingent given a place of honor right at the front of the march,” James said. The N.Y.P.D. presence struck the activists as particularly ironic, since the Stonewall riots had been provoked by a police raid. After delivering a set of demands to H.O.P., the mayor, and the police commissioner and getting brushed off, the group, calling itself the Reclaim Pride Coalition, took on the “colossal task” of organizing its own march.
James, who is an organizer for the queer caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, helped arrange the first meetings at the caucus’s space at the L.G.B.T. Center, in the West Village. One point of contention was whether to allow the Gay Officers Action League, or goal, to participate. “Eventually we came out on the side of the fact that the N.Y.P.D. as an institution, as a whole, is a racist one, and therefore having any representation of it wasn’t proper,” James said, though police officers were welcome to march as individuals, out of uniform. (Renna defended the presence of goal at the main march, saying, “It’s a free-speech march. If you’re going to let the Communists march, you’re going to let the police who are queer.”) “We wanted to get rid of the barricades, and we wanted certain police-free zones within the area,” James said. A subgroup negotiated with the N.Y.P.D. “We didn’t get a formal permit,” she said. “But we did get an assurance that they would not interfere with our march.”
The start time was set for 9:30 a.m. That morning, things did not start off promisingly. “We were there at the intersection, and there was just us,” Jon Carter, one of the marshals, recalled. “We looked around and we could see empty streets, and there was a real question about what the day would look like.” Then, after thirty-five minutes, there was an “If you build it, they will come” moment, as marchers materialized. (The group estimates that forty-five thousand people attended.) “We were very intentional about having trans people in the front,” Barjon said. It ended with a rally on the Great Lawn, with speakers who included the act up veteran Larry Kramer. Walker recalled, “Larry did his normal thing that he always does, which is to scream at queer people and go, ‘You’re not doing enough!’ ”
The group was busy planning a 2020 edition of the march when covid-19 struck. After New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, temporarily banned large gatherings, the Pride March and its rambunctious challenger both cancelled. The Reclaim Pride Coalition decided to hold a virtual event, called Livestream for Queer Liberation. (The group also protested the controversial field hospital that was set up in Central Park by Franklin Graham’s organization Samaritan’s Purse, which asked volunteers to sign a statement opposing same-sex marriage.) But the calculation changed in early June, after the killings of George Floyd and other black Americans by the police sparked a wave of mass protests. “There was unanimity that we needed to have a march,” Walker said. “And we needed to have it centered on the movement for black lives.”
With only weeks to plan, the march’s scrappy, D.I.Y. quality worked in its favor. “The simplicity of our approach to organizing marches and actions makes things very fluid and flexible, and we’re able to pivot in a way that a more complex plan wouldn’t allow us to,” Carter said. The main Pride March, which Carter called a “polished spectacle,” is still not happening this year. It’s as if the covid-19 meteor killed off a twelve-million-dollar dinosaur, and a smaller, more resourceful organism survived to fill the parade-size void. Nevertheless, the group has adapted to the new circumstances: it’s gathering masks and hand sanitizer and will still put material online for people who can’t take the health risk of attending in person. It isn’t seeking any type of police blessing, advertising only the starting point (Foley Square). Also, James said, “We have voted on a start time, 1 p.m., so for the queers that utterly took umbrage at our 9:30 start time last year, I’m sure they’ll be relieved.”
The group’s timing is apt. Outside Stonewall, there’s now a sign reading “pride is a riot!”
An activist in Russia has claimed that authorities in the notoriously anti-LGBT+ country have recognised his same-sex marriage through a legal loophole.
Same-sex marriage is not legal in Russia, and the country’s “gay propaganda” law prohibits the promotion of homosexuality.
But a legal loophole in the country’s family law has led to Russian authorities unintentionally recognising the marriage of Igor Kochetkov and Kir Fyodorov, The Moscow Times reports.
Because of the loophole, the Russian tax service was reportedly forced to grant Kochetkov a tax deduction on his husband’s behalf – a benefit commonly enjoyed by married couples.
A loophole in the Family Code of Russia forced the state to recognise their same-sex marriage.
On the third anniversary of the couple’s marriage in the United States, Kochetkov posted on Facebook about the tax service’s recognition of their marriage.
“Today is a beautiful day!” he wrote. “Exactly three years ago, Igor and I officially became husbands.
“But I wanted to tell you about something else,” he said.
Russia, in the face of its official institutions, recognised the same-sex marriage.
Kochetkov explained that he and his husband studied the country’s Family Code and found that, while it did not allow for same-sex marriages, it also did not prohibit them.
He said the country’s Family Code recognises marriages that took place abroad – which includes Kochetkov and his husband.
“No recognition procedure is required, you can simply start enjoying family rights on the basis of marriage documents,” he wrote.
The country granted them tax benefits without asking any questions.
The couple decided to put the loophole to the test to see if they could force the Russian government to recognise their marriage.
“At the end of last year Igor insured my life, after which we collected a package of documents and sent it to the tax to receive social deductible for the spouse.
“We were waiting for a refusal after which we could start suing for recognition of our marriage in Russia. And completely unexpectedly, the Federal Tax Service approved this deductible to us and has already transferred money.”
He added: “Which means that Russia, in the face of its official institutions, recognised the same-sex marriage.”
This is not the first time a same-sex couple has received legal recognition in Russia. In 2018, Yevgeny Voytsekhovsky and Pavel Stotsko had their marriage, which also took place abroad, recognised through the same legal loophole.
However, they were later forced to flee the country after anti-LGBT+ activists threatened them. They later vowed to never return to Russia.
The latest legally recognised union comes just a week before Russia will vote on a series of constitutional amendments which would allow Vladimir Putin to remain president until 2036 and could also see marriage defined as being a union between a man and a woman.