Gay Rights
stcynic | December 31, 2004So says the BBC:
The Spanish government has approved a draft law which will legalise homosexual marriages.
The bill gives same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples, including the right to adopt children.
The Roman Catholic Church and conservative opposition have fiercely opposed the move, which opinion polls suggest has the public's support.
If the bill is approved by parliament, it will make Spain the third EU country to authorise gay marriages.
And naturally, the opposition is making the same absurd argument they always make:
After the vote, the Spanish Bishops' Conference…
stcynic | December 28, 2004Okay, here's an odd story, perhaps. The Alliance Defense Fund, the same religious right legal group that is representing Steven Williams in his lawsuit against the Cupertino School District (the group that sent out the utterly dishonest "Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom" press release), is also representing a woman who was in a lesbian relationship before the Utah Supreme Court in a custody battle with her now ex-spouse. Cheryl Barlow and Keri Jones were a lesbian couple for quite some time. They made the decision to have a child and Barlow underwent artificial insemination.…
stcynic | December 27, 2004Here's yet another example of those "family values" we're always hearing about. In Florida in 1995, Judge Joseph Tarbuck ordered that Mary Ward's 11 year old daughter be taken out of her mother's custody and given to her father, based solely on the mother's lesbianism (as is normal in such cases, there was no evidence at all that Ward was a bad mother). In his decision, Judge Tarbuck says, "This child should be given the opportunity and the option to live in a nonlesbian world." He doesn't bother to mention that the father had spent 9 years in prison for killing his first wife in a custody…
stcynic | December 26, 2004In California, the first round of what will almost certainly be a long court battle over gay marriage has just wrapped up the trial phase. After the mayor of San Francisco began performing gay marriages last year (a bad, and politically motivated, idea), opponents of gay marriage appealed immediately to the California Supreme Court. That court did order a halt to the gay marriages, which are specifically forbidden by California law, but refused to rule on the constitutionality of that law until it worked its way up through the courts in standard fashion. In the first phase, the judge has…