New York Jury Finds Officer Accused Of Police Brutality Not Guilty, Senator Joe Lieberman To Sponsor Bill Repealing American Military Ban On Gays Openly, Study Finds Speedy Implementation Of Gay Military Policy Does Not Prove Disruptive, Louisiana To Appeal Gay Adoption Ruling, California Assemblywoman Proposes Bill To Remove Mandate To Find Cure For Homosexuality

All three New York City police officers have been acquitted of all counts late Monday morning in the trail of Officer Richard Kern, accused of police brutality by Michael Mineo. The alleged attack took place on a platform of a Brooklyn subway platform, Kern apparently having sodomized Mineo with a baton while two other officers looked on, who witnesses said during the trial taunted Mineo. The jury took one day to reach a verdict.

According to reports, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman will introduce a bill next week to repeal the American military ban on gays serving openly. Lieberman, an independent as well as a critical member of the senate armed services committee, will act as the bill’s sponsor, but many fear that the senator’s history of erratic political decisions coupled with fact that Lieberman has made numerous enemies on both the left and the right, will undermine any chance the bill has to succeed. Lieberman says his commitment to repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” is twofold. Allowing gays to serve openly dovetails with the American promise of providing all with “an equal opportunity to do whatever job their talents and sense of purpose and motivations lead them to want to do, including military service,” and, according to the senator,” When you artificially limit the pool of people who can enlist then you are diminishing military effectiveness.”

An exhaustive study to be released Tuesday found foreign militaries that have transitioned to allow openly gay service members concludes that a quick implementation is not disruptive, directly contradicting arguments made by top Pentagon officials that a repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” would take upwards of two years to complete.

Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell is almost certain to appeal a federal appeals court order last week requiring that the state issue an amended birth certificate that lists the names of two men who adopted a child born in Shreveport, Louisiana through a New York state court. The appeal is of interest as it will act as another test for the state by state implementation of gay rights, and whether one state’s law trumps another.

California Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, a Democrat from Long Beach, introduced a bill that would edit a section from the state’s Welfare and Institutions Code that mandates finding a “cure” for homosexuality. The section, which became law in 1967, requires the Department of Mental Health to “plan, conduct and cause to be conducted scientific research into the causes and cures of sexual deviation, including deviations conducive to sex crimes against children, and the causes and cures of homosexuality, and into methods of indentifying potential sex offenders.” Lowenthal said “the fact this language has survived this long is pretty amazing. We need to blot it out and make it clear we’re moving forward as a society, not backward.”