Police in the east African state of Malawi have arrested two of its most prominent LGBTI campaigners.
Authorities arrested Gift Trapence on charges of fraud. Trapence heads the LGBTI organizaton, the Center for Development of People (CEDEP).
They also arrested Anglican priest and human rights activist, Reverend Macdonald Sembereka. The two men are members of the Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC).
Police raided Trapence’s home, just a week after he staged public demonstrations, protesting the May election results. Trapence has openly criticized and protested against newly reelected President Peter Mutharika.
Recently, the president accused Trapence of trying to create a ‘lawless society’.
Sembereka and Trapence organized the protests on behalf of HRDC, which call for the chairperson of the Malawi Electoral Commission to resign.
The protests descended into violence with some protesters turning to looting, burning tires and fighting police. Police arrested more than 70 people after the clashes.
‘We are not attacking the government; and no one wants to overthrow the government. These peaceful demonstrations are being done to force Jane Ansah to resign,’ Trapence said.
But police accused Trapence of fraud ‘involving millions of Kwacha.’ (hundreds of thousands in US dollars).
The state broadcaster said an international organization filed a complaint against. One report suggested the local UNAIDS bureau filed the complaint, but it has not confirmed that report.about Trapence’s alleged fraudulent activities.
‘National Police Spokesperson James Kadadzera said police have arrested the two for misappropriation of donor aid money, with the complaint being lodged by the United Nations (UN) Agency,’ according to the Malawi Freedom Network.
That some article also said people reacted with surprise at the timing of the two activists.
The MWF wrote: ‘many people, who are wondering as to why, their arrest comes at the pick of their heavy criticism of government, amid dissatisfaction over poor management of elections by the state appointed Charperson of the electoral body, Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC).’
A total of 206 companies have signed onto a legal brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to find Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars discrimination against LGBT people in the workforce.
The friend-of-the-court brief — organized by the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, Out & Equal, Out Leadership and Freedom for All Americans — is signed by the nation’s top businesses and argues anti-LGBT discrimination is a form of sex discrimination, thus illegal under the Title VII.
Among the signers are food companies like Domino’s Pizza and Coca-Cola Company, tech companies like Facebook and Mozilla Corp., and defense contractors like Northrup Grumman Corp.
“Even where companies voluntarily implement policies to prohibit sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, such policies are not a substitute for the force of law,” the brief says. “Nor is the patchwork of incomplete state or local laws sufficient protection —for example, they cannot account for the cross-state mobility requirements of the modern workforce. Only a uniform federal rule can enable businesses to recruit and retain, and employees to perform, at their highest levels.”
According to the Human Rights Campaign, the brief has more corporate signers than any previous business brief in an LGBT non-discrimination case.
The brief was written by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, a Los Angeles-based law firm that also represents the signers in the case along with Robinson Curley P.C. and Taylor & Cohen LLP.
Erin Uritus, CEO of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, said in a statement the brief “exposes the lie that affirming Civil Rights protections for LGBTQ Americans is somehow anti-business.”
“The opposite is true,” Uritus said. “Equality is good for businesses and employees. And consumers — who are increasingly savvy and intentional about their spending power — are demanding equality. I’m inspired by all of the leaders who have joined with us today in submitting this brief. The Civil Rights Act needs to be affirmed in a way that serves and protects all Americans.”
A man serving 30 years for not disclosing his HIV status to sexual partners has been released 25 years earlier.
Former college wrestler Michael ‘Tiger Mandingo’ Johnson left Boonville’s prison, Missouri, yesterday (9 July).
In 2013, Johnson was the protagonist of what many defined a racially charged trial. His case was also one of the most relevant in the ongoing discussion about the criminalization of HIV transmission.
Criminalizing transmission
‘I feel great,’ Johnson told BuzzFeed as he left Boonville Correctional Center.
‘Leaving prison is such a great feeling.’
Police arrested Johnson, a black man, for ‘recklessly’ transmitting HIV to two men and exposing four others to it. Four out of these six sexual partners are white men.
The jury found him guilty of one of the two transmission cases and of all four exposure cases.
Johnson was serving 30 years
What struck many was the way Johnson’s trial was handled, particularly the fact that jurors were reportedly shown images of the man’s penis.
Johnson ended up receiving a lengthier sentence than Missouri’s average for second-degree murder, 30.5 years.
In December 2016, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Eastern District overturned his conviction because prosecutors had waited until the last moment to disclose evidence.
To avoid another trial, Johnson took a no-contest Alford plea deal. He was later granted suspended parole.
Black men and HIV
Some argue that Johnson’s case proved that race plays a part in HIV transmission trials in the US.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published research projecting that if current trends continue, one in every two black men who have sex with men in the US would become HIV positive in their lifetimes. This would happen despite them having ‘fewer partners and lower rates of recreational drug use than other gay men’.
On a global level, a disproportionate number of the roughly 1 million people a year who die of AIDS are black.
HIV transmission law in Missouri
Current state law in Missouri punishes HIV-exposure by up to 15 years in prison, or as many as 30 years if HIV is transmitted.
A Republican bill tried to change the law by reducing punishment for knowingly transmitting HIV from a felony to a misdemeanor. If passed, the new law would have taken into account several factors. Among these, whether the accused used a condom or was taking medication.
The bill’s sponsors say they will try again to get it passed in the next legislative session.
James Polchin’s Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall, excavates garish true crime headlines to reveal the forgotten murders of gay men. In pursuing these trails and trials of blood and ink, Polchin exposes American society’s exploitative misunderstanding of gay men, as well as the initial cultural shifts that fueled the revolution that was Stonewall.
One tragic story after another charts reportage of a shocking crime transmogrified into sympathy if not outright support for the perpetrators -once the victim’s sexuality becomes decoded. Killers are “cherubic cowboys” provoked by the supposed shock of a homosexual advance. Unasked at the time, over and over: why relative strangers would meet in hotel rooms for reasons other than sex. Within Indecent Advances, we witness the birth of the “gay panic” defense. Though this hideous justification has been degraded as visibility and legal rights in the U.S. have been asserted, “gay panic” is still successfully deployed by defense attorneys to excuse the murder of gay men (Texas, 2018). Such crimes often led to pogroms by the press and local officials, as seen in the brutal murders of William Simpson in Miami, 1954, and Fernando Rios in New Orleans, in 1958. While Simpson’s killers were pardoned in the newspapers but found guilty of manslaughter (a lesser crime) in court and both served time, Rios’ murderers were not only acquitted, but rewarded with uproarious applause. Both communities reacted by expunging its gay citizens with every legal means at their disposal.
Viewing gay history through the lens of crime, Polchin re-orders mid-century events and history-makers in startling ways: Walt Whitman’s horrific beating by a trick in a hotel room becomes another link in this traumatic chain of assault. Chicago gay murderers Leopold and Loeb, the source for Hitchcock’s The Rope, are gleefully pounced upon by the media as universal proof of homosexual deviancy. William Burroughs and Ginsberg’s friendship with murder victim David Kammerer is examined as well as its influences on Kerouac’s life and work, including his novel, The Subterraneans. Sources like Chauncey’s classic Gay New York are duly sited, and nearly forgotten texts like Terror in the Streets and The Sixth Man are recovered as invaluable socio-political reference points. The works of Baldwin and Gore Vidal provide additional insight, and Polchin mines the African-American press of the time to provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the era than what was printed in white-owned newspapers desperate for blood, high on indignation while low on integrity.
We fought back. With the formation of the Mattachine Society came ONE magazine, the pioneering effort to combat homophobia, which was organized against such egregious press coverage; “the need for an independent publication to counter narratives of homosexual criminality and mental sickness in the popular press was crucial in building a wider consciousness about homosexuality as a minority identity. Launched in January of 1953, the publication had over 2,000 subscribers within a few months.” The sexual earthquake that was Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male added scientific heft to the conversation. The seeds for revolution were sown.
Ours is a history of violence. One once voraciously cheered on by the press. Though, speaking broadly, their opinion of us has journeyed from loathing to neutral scientific curiosity to pet cause, is it really a shift in the nation’s attitude toward queer folk, or do we just hire better lawyers? We’re far from free of the violence that Indecent Advances details. See David McConnell’s searing, contemporary Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men. Though no longer actively encouraged by the media, blood is spilt anywhere and everywhere over a misconstrued look, a poorly timed pass, outré´Biblical passages or anything and everything that would make straight men think others might perceive him a fag.
Newsflash: our enemies are not simply misinformed or a bunch of closet cases. They are dangerous and organized. Indecent Advances collects and rescues significant gay history and goes a long way toward clarifying why we fight, what we fight for and how prejudice is an historically institutional force.
Sidebar quote:
“Once a man assumes the role of homosexual,” wrote the editors of the widely circulated Coronet magazine in 1950, “he often throws off all moral restraints,” adding such men “descend through perversion to other forms of perversion, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.” This progressive model of perversion, in which anti-social behavior spirals toward ever-increasing, dire forms of violence, was a prevalent idea in popular magazines and newspaper articles about sex crimes in the late 1940s.
Multiple people attacked ex-gay bar owner, Jorge Sarmiento, 42, and his 80-year-old partner, Gerard Argiud, in their Atlántida home, according to reports.
In April 2017, unknown assailants strangled a trans woman, who also performed in drag,to death.
Sherlyn Montoya’s body was wrapped in sacks in a small alley in the northern part of the capital Tegucigalpa.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday announced the formation of a new commission that will take a “fresh look” at human rights through the lens of “natural law,” and civil and human rights advocates are outraged. In preliminary filings the State Dept. noted the Commission will explore “our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”
“Natural law,” is religious right wing extremist code for anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rights, especially marriage for same-sex couples.
Secretary Pompeo, a known right wing Christian extremist in his own right, has named Mary Ann Glendon, a professor who is also his former mentor, to lead the “Commission on Unalienable Rights.”
“I hope that the commission will revisit the most basic of questions: What does it mean to claim something is, in fact, a human right?” Pompeo told reporters Monday, adding, as Yahoo News notes, that “words like rights can be used for good or evil.”
Glendon should understand Pompeo’s remarks. She penned a 2004 op-ed supporting a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. In a unique twist of language she claimed the amendment “should be welcomed by all Americans who are concerned about equality and preserving democratic decision-making.”
And in a shocking move Glendon chastised the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to the Boston Globe for its work exposing pedophile priests. She reportedly said; “If fairness & accuracy have anything to do with it, awarding the Pulitzer to the Boston Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden.”
Anti-gay hate group leader Tony Perkins was briefed on the Commission before it was officially announced, CBS News reports.
A State Dept. official says the Commission is a “personal project” of Secretary Pompeo’s, and Politico reports the Commission “was conceived with almost no input from the State Department’s human rights bureau, people familiar with the matter say, effectively sidelining career government experts who have focused on human rights policy and history across numerous administrations.”
“This administration has actively worked to deny and take away long-standing human rights protections since Trump’s inauguration. If this administration truly wanted to support people’s rights, it would use the global framework that’s already in place. Instead, it wants to undermine rights for individuals, as well as the responsibilities of governments.”
“This approach only encourages other countries to adopt a disregard for basic human rights standards and risks weakening international, as well as regional frameworks, placing the rights of millions of people around the world in jeopardy.”
“International agreements, like the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, have been upheld by prior administrations over the last 71 years, regardless of their party. This politicization of human rights in order to, what appears to be an attempt to further hateful policies aimed at women and LGBTQ people, is shameful.”
Positive Images 200 Montgomery Dr Suite C Santa Rosa
“This training provides an opportunity for LGBTQ community members to learn to identify what makes a relationship healthy. By understanding what makes a relationship healthy, participants can better identify risk of violence or coercive behavior.”
https://www.facebook.com/events/636767583401696/
Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ Communities
Wednesday July 10th from 1-5pm
La Plaza at Lincoln Elementary 850 West 9th St, Santa Rosa
“This training provides an opportunity for service providers to learn about the dynamics of intimate partner violence that are specific to LGBTQ communities and the need for specialized services for LGBTQ survivors of intimate partner violence. Participants will learn to understand intimate partner violence in LGBTQ communities in terms of the workings of heterosexism and cissexism, as well as how to better identify and support LGBTQ survivors in interactive activities. This training will also provide a brief introduction into the importance of screening and assessment, as well as tools and resources for providing culturally accessible and affirming services and support for LGBTQ survivors.”
https://www.facebook.com/events/2259419960986981/
Please join us for both of these wonderful trainings! Follow the links to learn more information. We’ve attached fliers for next week’s trainings and invite you to share it with anyone you think would be interested!
If you haven’t joined our Facebook group yet, please do so! We are hoping this will be an easy way to share information and announcements in the coming months. You can join the group here:
Human Rights Watch has updated our marriage equality map, which provides an overview of countries with marriage equality, civil unions or registered partnership; links to the relevant legislation; and, where possible, a brief explanation of the path – legislative, judicial, or other – that these countries took to achieve marriage equality or to provide for same-sex civil unions or registered partnership.
As legal situations change in countries, this map will be further updated.
In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to open civil marriage to same-sex couples. Other countries followed. Today there are 28 countries with marriage equality—most recently, Austria, Ecuador and Taiwan– with Costa Rica expected to join the list soon.
An additional fourteen countries have made civil unions or registered partnerships available for same-sex couples. In some cases, civil unions or registered partnership provide all the same rights and responsibilities of civil marriage and differ in name only; countries with such laws include Croatia, Greece, Slovenia and Switzerland. In other cases, civil unions provide some, but not all, of these rights.
In 2018, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued an advisory opinion on the interpretation of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights in respect of marriage equality. The Court encouraged member states to take actions towards eliminating discrimination and achieving marriage equality.
There are causes to celebrate during Pride Month, as laws and policies continue to improve LGBT rights around the world.
We hope this map will assist those who are looking for this type of information. We decided to only mark independent countries on our map and not overseas territories, regions, departments or possessions. That’s why we did not include Bermuda, Greenland or Aruba for instance. If you have additional information, you can contact Human Rights Watch via lgbt@hrw.org
Recognition of same-sex relationships
Click on each country for a snapshot of current legislation. For more information and Human Rights Watch reporting on LGBT rights, click on the country name in the black pop-up box.
Established in Istanbul in 1890, Bomonti is Turkey’s oldest modern brewery and produces one of the country’s most popular lagers. The rainbow-coloured bottle was unveiled in an Instagram post by the head of Bomonti’s branding agency, alongside the caption: “We did it!”
It’s a bold move in a country which has been named the second-most restrictive on gay rights in Europe. Amnesty International previously told PinkNews in 2018 that Turkish LGBT+ people are “living in more fear than ever.”
Although courts ruled in April that the two-year ban on Pride parades could technically be lifted, Amnesty reported in May that “appalling” violence had been used against students holding a Pride march in the capital city of Ankara. Authorities also stripped the scholarships of students detained in the march.
And on Sunday (June 30) another Pride rally in Istanbul ended with tear gas and rubber bullets.
This current political climate makes Bomonti’s decision to embrace LGBT+ rights particularly significant — and while the commercialisation of Pride may be common in other countries, the Turkish LGBT+ community couldn’t be happier to see the beer brand following suit.
@zekibaskaya said, “I’m shocked! but really excellent idea,” @logolepsi said, “You’ve made us even more happy with rainbow marketing,” and @benimadimsencer said: “We’re so happy, so excited. For the first time in Turkey, a brand is investing in Pride and standing behind us like a door.”
Saturday July 13 @ 7 pm. Zipline Improv at Occidental Center for the Arts. Skilled Bay Area actors led by local actress and founder Laura Wachtel present an evening of delightful improvised scenes and stories with your suggestions to inspire them. Their focus is on narrative improv both short scenes and full length. What will it be this time? Join us to see! $15 Adv/$20 at door. Fine Refreshments. Accessible to persons with disabilities. 707-874-9392. 3850 Doris Murphy Ct. Occidental, CA. 95465 www.occidentalcenterforthearts.org
