Gay couples in Portugal win limited adoption rights |

 Portugal's parliament on Friday handed same-sex couples the right to adopt the children or foster children of one partner, a partial victory for equality campaigners that fell short of their call for full adoption rights.

The co-adoption law scraped through with a majority of just five votes in the 230-seat Lisbon assembly, prompting long applause from the gallery. Nine deputies abstained and as many as 28 did not show up for the vote.

Activists hailed the biggest step forward for gay rights since Portugal became the eighth country to allow nationwide same-sex marriages in 2010, breaking with the Catholic nation's predominantly conservative image.

"It was a super-important, fundamental approval as it concerns the human rights of the children and not just the couples," said Paulo Corte-Real, head the country's gay, lesbian and transgender rights association, ILGA.

He said the law would benefit children raised by same-sex couples by giving the children additional protection if their original parent died or became seriously ill.

Catholic Church leaders have opposed moves by some European countries to allow same-sex unions and adoption by gay couples, saying heterosexual marriage has an indispensable role in society.

France, which is mainly Catholic, last month followed 13 countries including Canada, Denmark, Sweden and most recently Uruguay and New Zealand in allowing gay and lesbian couples to tie the knot. The French law also authorized adoption.

The Portuguese bill, presented on the International Day Against Homophobia, still needs to be signed into law by conservative President Anibal Cavaco Silva, who enacted the same-sex marriage bill in 2010 but expressed his disapproval.

Another bill introduced by two left-wing parties that would have extended full adoption rights to gay couples failed to pass on Friday.

The ILGA took the Portuguese state to court after the European Court for Human Rights ruled in February that Austria's adoption laws discriminated against gay people on the issue of co-adoption.
 Reuters:

Republicans / Conservatives in Denial on Marriage Realities.

 When Brian Brown of NOM is confronted with the mounting evidence of tide turning strongly in favour of marriage equality, his typical response is to insist that the recent victories have all been in “deep blue” states, so that there is little room for further states to approve same – sex marriage. He’s fooling himself – just like the rest of the political and social conservatives so conspicuously and vainly hold back the tide. Recent polling neatly illustrates how very out of touch with reality these people are.

Gallup’s latest release of its regular, biannual polling on gay marriage shows that for the fifth consecutive reading, support equals or beats opposition. Over the past five years, a net majority of 16% opposed has transformed into a net majority of 8% in favour, a turnaround of 24%. Numerous other polls, by a wide range of polling companies, have reported similar results, with all showing either majority or plurality support (one even showed support at nearly 60%), All the trend data similarly shows rapidly increasing support. Anybody reading the news should by now be completely familiar with.

Nor is this rising support restricted to the blue states. Minnesota, site of the latest victory for marriage, has voted blue in the most recent presidential elections, but featured on every list of battleground states that could conceivably flip, and indeed elected a Republican legislature in 2010 – the only reason that the proposal to entrench discrimination in the state constitution made it onto the ballot in 2012. Minnesota is a purple state, not “deep blue”. So is Michigan, which Mitt Romney deluded himself into believing was winnable, right into the final days of his campaign. But a poll just released shows that in Michigan too, there is now clear majority support for equal marriage at 57% – and rising: “up 12.5 percentage points from last year — movement fueled largely by shifting opinions from Republicans and independents”, reports theDetroit News

continue reading at Queering the Church:

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Zambia gay rights activist trial delayed - Africa | IOL News | IOL.co.za

 The high profile trial of prominent Zambian gay rights activist Paul Kasonkomona was delayed on Wednesday, after his lawyer argued the charges were vague and should be heard by the High Court.

Kasonkomona, 38, was arrested in April and charged with “soliciting for immoral purposes” after appearing on a live television programme where he argued for gay rights.

That was interpreted as promoting homosexuality.

Kasonkomona pleaded not guilty to the charge.

His lawyer, Sunday Nkonde, argued in court on Wednesday that there was no clear legal definition of what constitutes “immoral purposes”.

“We humbly pray that this is a fit and proper case for reference to the high court of Zambia to determine the constitutionality of the issues raised,” Nkonde said.

Magistrate Lameck Ngambi adjourned the matter to June 4 to allow the state to respond to the application by Kasonkomona's lawyers.

Kasonkomona's arrest outraged human rights groups, which had been calling for his immediate release and for the “spurious” charges against him to be dropped.

Homosexuality is outlawed in Zambia, as in most African countries, and discrimination against gays and lesbians is rife. - AFP

-IOL News 

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Brazilian judicial council: Notaries must recognize same-sex marriage

The Brazilian National Council of Justice, which oversees the nation's judiciary, passed a resolution Tuesday that denies notaries the right to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.

In Brazil, notaries officiate marriages and civil unions.

Recently, 12 Brazilian states began allowing same-sex couples to marry or convert their civil unions into marriages. However, since the Supreme Court does not carry legislative powers, it was up to each notary to officiate at their discretion, and many refused, citing the lack of law.

Joaquim Barbosa, president of the Council of Justice, said in the decision that notaries cannot continue to refuse to "perform a civil wedding or the conversion of a stable civil union into a marriage between persons of the same sex."

Barbosa, who also presides over the Supreme Court, says the resolution merely follows the transformation of society.

"Our society goes through many changes, and the National Council of Justice cannot be indifferent to them," he said.

Civil unions between same-sex couples have been recognized in Brazil since 2011, after the Supreme Court ruled that the same rights and rules that apply to "stable unions" of heterosexual couples would apply to same-sex couples, including the right to joint declaration of income tax, pension, inheritance and property sharing. People in same-sex unions are also allowed to extend health benefits to their partners, following the same rules applied to heterosexual couples.

Brazilian lawmakers have debated same-sex marriage, but in most cases, the bills introduced have not progressed through Congress.

Brazilian neighbors Uruguay and Argentina are the only other two countries in Latin America that have laws allowing same-sex couples to marry.

- CNN

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signs civil unions bill into law

Joins eight other states that have civil unions or similar laws

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper today signed into law a measure that legalizes same-sex civil unions in his state.

The new law provides gay and lesbian couples with such legal protections and responsibilities as the ability to take family leave to care for a partner, to make medical and end-of-life decisions for a partner, to live together in a nursing home, and to adopt children together.
During his annual State of the State address in January, Hickenlooper challenged the state legislature to move forward by saying: 'This year, let's do it. Let's pass civil unions!'
He had also publicly supported civil unions during his address a year earlier.
The law takes effect May 1.
It was just seven years ago that the state voted to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage. It will join eight states that have civil unions or similar laws. Nine states and the District of Columbia allow gay marriage.
Among those present at the signing was Colorado House Speaker Mark Ferrandino, a gay Denver Democrat who backed the bill.
'With the Governor’s signature here today, the protection of Colorado’s laws will now extend equally to all,' Ferrandino said in a statement. Thousands of Colorado families will now be able to receive the recognition they deserve.'
He added: 'Ladies and gentlemen, the Colorado sun now warms all our people.

Charles Murray Urges the G.O.P. to Accept Gay Marriage : The New Yorker

Political scientist Charles Murray has never backed away from controversy, but usually his opponents have been liberals. Friday, however, he managed to upset conservatives at the annual conference known as CPAC, where thousands of bewildered Republicans gathered to figure out the way forward after their party’s 2012 electoral defeat. Murray ditched his prepared remarks on “America Coming Apart” in favor of an impromptu admonition to fellow conservatives to accept the legalization of both gay marriage and abortion.

Murray, who is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is revered by many conservatives. (He considers himself a libertarian.) His 1984 book “Losing Ground,” which blamed social programs for worsening poverty, and his 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which ascribed lower I.Q. scores to some minorities, have been attacked by liberals but embraced as game-changers by many conservatives.

As he got warmed up, Murray explained that, while driving for more than an hour that morning to the conference, he had begun talking out loud to himself, which is how he usually practices his speeches. Upon realizing that he had more than an hour’s worth of fresh thoughts, he decided to simply drop the planned ones. The question on his mind was “How can conservatives make their case after the election?,” and the answer he wanted to share was drawn from his experience with his own four children. They range in age, he said, from twenty-three to forty-three. While they share many of his views on limiting the size of government, and supporting free enterprise, he said, “Not one of them thought of voting for a Republican President” in the last election. Their disenchantment with the Republican Party was not specifically because of Mitt Romney, he added, but because, “They consider the Party to be run by anti-abortion, anti-gay, religious nuts.”

“With gay marriage,” he went on, “I think the train has left the station.”

Certainly the locomotive power of the issue seemed hard to miss on a day when the top political news was Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman’s announcement that he, too, supports gay marriage. (Richard Socarides has more on that.) While Portman’s position shifted because of his family situation—he explained publicly for the first time that his son had come out as gay—Murray said his own views had been influenced heavily by friends. “I was dead-set against gay marriage when it was first broached,” Murray said; as a fan of Edmund Burke, he regarded marriage as an ancient and indispensable cultural institution that “we shouldn’t mess with.” He used to agree with his friend Irving Kristol, the late father of neo-conservatism, that gay people wouldn’t like marriage. “ ‘Let them have it,’ ” he recounted Kristol as saying, with a chuckle. “ ‘They wont like it.’ ” Murray said that he himself used to think that “All they want is the wedding, and the party, and the honeymoon—but not this long thing we call marriage.”

But since then, Murray said, “we have acquired a number of gay and lesbian friends,” and to what he jokingly called his “dismay” as a “confident” social scientist, he learned he’d been wrong. He’d been especially influenced by the pro-gay-marriage arguments made by Jonathan Rausch, an openly gay writer for the National Journal and the Atlantic. Further, Murray said, he had discovered that the gay couples he knew with children were not just responsible parents; they were “excruciatingly responsible parents.”

Read more: The New Yorker

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Republicans for Gay Marriage? - Daniel Foster - National Review Online

Jan van Lohuizen, a former George W. Bush pollster with a Ph.D. from Rice, is on a mission to show that opposition to same-sex marriage is a political and demographic dead end, propped up by a shrinking core of the old, the undereducated, and the highly churched. Bitter clingers, if you will, to the idea of traditional marriage.

“I have any number of gay friends who are Republicans, but what makes me tick is that I have concerns that this is another issue that would limit the growth of the Republican party,” van Lohuizen told me in a phone interview.

“If you believe that the government is better off if it is governed by Republicans than Democrats, you have to worry about issues that impede the growth of the party. And this is one.”

Together with Joel Benenson, former lead pollster for President Obama’s first campaign, van Lohuizen has looked at decades of polling data on gay marriage and come to some interesting conclusions in a series of memos the pair has distributed to policymakers, think tanks, and political media"

 - National Review Online

These are the key factors they point to:

• Most significant, support for gay marriage is accelerating - from about1 percent a year until 2009, and then an increase to 4 or 5 percent.
• The coalition supporting gay marriage is more broad-based than the coalition opposing it. The opposition is really concentrated in a few really small groups, evangelical whites, tea-party Republicans, older voters, and whites that do not have a college degree.
• Republican opposition to same-sex marriage is increasingly tenuous. Tea-party Republicans oppose gay marriage 84/13, while Republicans who describe themselves as opposed to the Tea Party oppose gay marriage by  52/47 splits. 
• 51 percent of Republicans under 30 support gay marriage in their state.

If this datum alone holds, one might think, gay marriage is a fait accompli in the near to medium term. And indeed, the polls report just that feeling among the broader public: 83 percent of voters, supporters and opponents included, think that gay marriage will be legal nationally in the next five to ten years. 

  - National Review Online

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