rays.list@comcast.net and we'll be happy to send the full article.
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The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/19/AR2006101900971_pf.html
Gay Republicans Fight Perceived Oxymoron
By DAVID CRARY
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 19, 2006; 4:37 PM
-- They are members of an increasingly exclusive club _ a district attorneyand a mayor from southern California, a legislator from Minnesota, a handfulof others scattered across the country. They are elected officials who areRepublican and openly gay.
"People think it's an oxymoron," said the Minnesota state senator, PaulKoering. "How can you be gay and be in the Republican Party?"
Never more than a tiny fraction of GOP politicians, openly gay Republicansare about to disappear from Congress with the retirement of Rep. Jim Kolbeof Arizona, and Koering is the lone openly gay GOP state legislator _ out of7,382 seats nationwide. The Democrats, by contrast, have 56 openly gaylegislators and embrace an array of gay-rights causes.
Against that backdrop is the scandal involving Republican Mark Foley. Theformer Florida congressman who abruptly quit because of sexually explicitmessages he sent to male pages, and later acknowledged he is gay. Someconservatives cite the scandal as reason for the GOP to further distanceitself from gays; others think that's a long-term losing strategy.
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Forwarded from Kenneth Sherrill - Ken's List
Kenneth.Sherrill@hunter.cuny.edu
kenslist@groups.queernet.org
http://www.kintera.org/site/lookup.asp?c=nlI2IeN1JyE&b=1543215
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force leader responds to the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' proposed newguidelines, Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 - The Committee on Doctrine of the United StatesConference of Catholic Bishops today released proposed guidelines titledMinistry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination. The proposed guidelineswill be discussed and likely put to a vote when the Conference of Bishopsmeets Nov. 13-16 in Baltimore.
Statement from Matt Foreman, Executive Director, National Gay and LesbianTask Force
"There's plenty to be offended by in the new Catholic Church guidelinestitled Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination, but a few thingsstand out. First, the bishops tried to sound more compassionate by writingthat even though the Catholic Church believes 'the homosexual orientation isobjectively disordered,' that doesn't mean 'the person as a whole isdisordered.' However, they also stated that 'other inclinations can likewisebe disordered, such as those that lead to envy, malice or greed.' Sorry, butit's still an insult to compare an orientation that leads to love to'inclinations' that lead to harm.
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RTÉ, Ireland's state broadcasting company reprted the following this
evening;
Majority favours gay marriage rights
21 October 2006 22:07
A Sunday Tribune/Millward Browne opinion poll to be published tomorrow shows that almost two-thirds of those surveyed are in favour of gay and lesbian couples having the same legal and financial rights as married couples.
Support is highest among women and among those in the 18 to 35 age group.
But the survey also shows that 50% of people questioned are against allowing same sex couples to legally adopt children.
37% said they were in favour of such a move.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/1021/gaymarriage.html
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BBC World Television, 9.15 and 19.15 CET: "Sex Crimes and the Vatican" - powerhouse documentary TV journalism! (45 minutes)
(ALSO viewable at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/5389684.stm
or http://tinyurl.com/eo3dp)
Paul Moor
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
D-10715 Berlin
Telefon (4930) 8639-5784
Telefax (4930) 8639-5785
Skype
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The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/21/AR2006102101050_pf.html
How Foley Skirted Rules To Pursue Relationships
Former Pages Describe Lawmaker's Advances
By Amy Goldstein and Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 22, 2006; A01
They met on the House floor. He was a 16-year-old political junkie, dressedin the drab navy blazer and gray slacks of a congressional page, rushingphone messages to the members he served. Rep. Mark Foley was tanned andcharismatic, a successful politician in his mid-40s willing to joke with himbetween votes.
They talked perhaps a dozen times. Then at his page graduation ceremony thatJune, in 2002, he was excited when Foley appeared, uninvited, and dictatedhis personal e-mail address for the boy to jot in his memory book. "Istarted contacting him right away," the young man recalled. "I knew acongressman that I . . . talked to online. That was pretty cool."
The messages were innocent at first. But after the young man moved home, herecalled, Foley started asking about "my roommates, if I ever saw themnaked." Within months, the congressman was dangling a job offer, "because Iwas a hot boy," he said. Two years later, when he contacted Foley for adviceon D.C. hotels, the congressman wrote back: "You could always stay at myplace. I'm always here, I'm always lonely, and I'm always up for oral sex."
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/columnists/sfl-phoward22oct22,0,790191.column?coll=sfla-news-col
Naked confessions of Foley's priest are hard to stomach
Howard Goodman
Palm Beach columnist
October 22, 2006
Now, that's a relief: It was only saunas and massages in the nude,skinny-dipping and fondling. Thank God it was nothing like sex.
The interview confessions of the Rev. Anthony Mercieca induce a kind of stunned amazement that any man of the cloth would so easily admit tobehavior that's so patently wrong, while blithely acting as thougheverything was quite all right.Mercieca is the Roman Catholic priest who says he cavorted with a young altar boy named Mark Foley when he was assigned to Sacred Heart Church in Lake Worth in 1967.
Foley grew up to be the six-time Republican congressman with the secret lifethat included a nasty habit of engaging teenage boys in Internet-message sextalk.As the whole world knows, the 52-year-old from Fort Pierce abruptly resignedlast month when some of his cringe-producing exchanges with congressionalpages became public.
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The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Brooks.t.html?pagewanted=print
October 22, 2006
Where the Right Went Wrong
By DAVID BROOKS
Skip to next paragraph
THE CONSERVATIVE SOUL
How We Lost It, How to Get It Back.
By Andrew Sullivan.
294 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.
Andrew Sullivan is one of the best bloggers in the world, and for a time hisblog was popular with members of the Bush administration. It used to amuseme to imagine Bush staffers rising early from their marital beds, the sleepstill heavy in their eyes, padding over to their computers and having theirfirst human contact of the day with a gay Catholic Tory.
In those days, as in these, the war on terror was Sullivan's chief concern.He saw it as Bush did, as a comprehensive war against an extremist ideology,and he fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. But during 2004 Sullivangrew disenchanted with the Bush administration. He had always been inflamedby the Republican Party's opposition to gay marriage (like most bloggers,Sullivan gets inflamed on a daily basis), but now his criticism spread toother issues.
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Forwarded from Kenneth Sherrill - Ken's List
Kenneth.Sherrill@hunter.cuny.edu
kenslist@groups.queernet.org
http://www.wdcmedia.com/newsArticle.php?ID=2082
WDC MEDIA NEWS
Christian News and Media Agency
Public Nudity Not a First Amendment Right Says Attorney
2006-10-19 --
(AgapePress) - A recent ruling in Florida that affirms the right of acitizen to make a political protest using nudity is being questioned. Thecity of Daytona Beach finds itself having to consider an appeal after thestate's Seventh Judicial Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month uphelda lower-court decision that cleared charges of public nudity againstElizabeth Book for protesting topless on a city bridge in 2004.
The city said Book violated a public nudity ordinance two years ago; butjudges in the case so far have disagreed, saying it was a legitimatepolitical protest and not public indecency, according to Associated Press.An attorney with a First Amendment, religious speech firm says that notionhas no legal precedent.
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Forwarded from Kenneth Sherrill - Ken's List
Kenneth.Sherrill@hunter.cuny.edu
kenslist@groups.queernet.org
Colorado Gay Will Contest Ruling
Analysis by Professor Arthur Leonard of New York Law School
http://newyorklawschool.typepad.com/leonardlink/2006/10/
colorado_gay_wi.html
Leonard Link; October 21, 2006
Reversing a determination by Arapahoe County District Judge John Leopoldthat Ronald Wiltfong had died intestate, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruledon October 19 in Estate of Ronald Wiltfong, 2006 Westlaw 2975475, thatWiltfong's surviving domestic partner, Randall Rex, should have a chance toprove that Wiltfong intended to leave all of his property to Rex.
Rex and Wiltfong had been domestic partners for twenty years when Wiltfongdied. During the year before his death, Wiltfong and Rex were celebratingRex's birthday with two friends when Wiltfong gave Rex a birthday cardenclosing a typed letter that Wiltfong had signed. In the letter, Wiltfongstated that if anything should ever happen to him, everything he ownedshould go to Rex, and that Rex, their pets and an aunt were Wiltfong's onlyfamily. "Everyone else is dead to me," he wrote. According to Rex, Wiltfongstated to him and their friends that the letter represented his wishes.
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Forwarded from Kenneth Sherrill - Ken's List
Kenneth.Sherrill@hunter.cuny.edu
kenslist@groups.queernet.org
Gay sex and motorbikes
If an activity brings satisfaction to those who take part in it and harms no one, it can't be immoral
Peter Singer
Saturday October 21, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1928007,00.html
In recent years the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Spain have recognisedmarriages between people of the same sex. Several other countries recognisecivil unions with similar legal effect. An even wider range of countrieshave laws against discrimination on the basis of a person's sexualorientation, in areas such as housing and employment. Yet in the world's largest democracy, India, sex between two men remains a crime punishable,according to statute, by imprisonment for life.
India is not, of course, the only nation to retain severe punishments forhomosexuality. In some Islamic nations - Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen,for instance - sodomy is a crime for which the maximum penalty is death. Butthe retention of such laws is easier to understand in countries thatincorporate religious teachings into criminal law than in a seculardemocracy like India.
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