Amnesty International Accuses Britain Of Breaking International Law And Returning Asylum Applicants To Iraq, California Removes Gay Cure Mandate From Sex Crime Measure, Louisiana Rejects Gay Adoption Law, Leon Country Church Leaders Support Anti-Discrimination Law To Protect Gays, Scottish Conservative Again Disowned By Party For Saying Gay Not Normal

Amnesty International Tuesday accused a number of European countries, including Britain, of defying international rules governed by the United Nations, and forcibly returning asylum applicants to Iraq despite documented evidence of continued aggression and violence. Amnesty said that during the first week of April, over 100 civil deaths have occurred in Iraq, with ethnic and religious minorities, females, and gay men being specifically targeted. The organization also reports that in February, 2009 alone, 25 men and boys were killed merely because they were suspected of being gay. Amnesty is demanding that the countries named in the report in breach of the UN guidelines, return failed asylum seekers only when the security situation in Iraq is stabilised. Some seven years after the American led invasion of Iraq, the country continues to be rife with internal conflict, an open hostility often directed towards gays.

Monday, the 80 member California Assembly voted 62-0 to modify a 60 year old law in the state that mandated the Department of Health to find the cause and locate cures for homosexuality, categorizing homosexuality as a sexual deviance. The law was originally written as a part of larger law meant to combat sex crimes committed against children, but amid hysteria, gays again were made to be the source of all of society’s ills. Originally, Democratic Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, the author of the measure, meant to repeal the archaic bill entirely, but some legislators wanted to preserve language that promotes research into the causes of sex crimes committed against children. Lowenthal said “the result will be the law as it should have been written 60 years ago, but now we’re setting it right.”

In Louisiana, Senate Bill 129, which would have allowed unmarried couples to jointly adopt and to allow an existing parent to petition a court to add a second adult as a legal parent, was rejected by a Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill would have applied to all regardless of the adoptive parents’ sexual orientation, but predictably the debate fixated on the rights extended by the state to gay parents and to their children. Louisiana law currently restricts adoption to married couples or to single individuals – meaning that gay couples can adopt, but they must choose which adult has parental rights, a forced choice that is cruel and unequal. One of the opponents to the law, a Reverend Louis Husser, said “this bill is nothing more than social experimentation using our children as guinea pigs.”

In Florida, more than 20 members of local clergy in Leon County stood in front of the County Courthouse Monday to show support for revisions to the Leon County human rights code that would expand and strengthen anti-discrimination measures, preventing discrimination against based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The church leaders said the ordinance was a human rights issue, and is necessary to ensure additional protection for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals against discrimination beyond that afforded by state and federal law. Leon County commissioners will vote Tuesday evening on permitting the proposed ordinance to proceed as written and whether to hold a public hearing on the measure May 11th.

A Conservative candidate in Scotland has been suspended by the party after posting that gay people were “not normal” on his personal website. Philip Lardner’s comments were deemed “deeply offensive and unacceptable” by Scottish Conservative chairman Andrew Fulton, adding that “these views have no place in the modern Conservative party. Lardner was previously suspended by the same party for comments he made suggesting that Ian Smith, the leader of the white-rule Rhodesia, was a hero. Lardner, a primary school teacher, will still show on the ballot, but the party no longer supports him. Mr. Lardner contends that there is an obvious difference between the toleration of homosexuality and the state sanctioned promotion of homosexuality, an avowed opponent of the “agenda” to normalize gays.