Separate and unequal
By MATTHEW VAN DUSEN
Star-Tribune staff writer Sunday, June 06, 2004

The prison van winds its way north and east to Lusk.
Guards at the Wyoming Women's Center are transporting a prisoner from the Laramie County Detention Center. They pass small towns along the Union Pacific railroad where the mile-long coal trains rumble by. No one says much.

The prisoner, Miki Ann Dimarco, passed six bad checks in February and March of 1998 for a total of $742.85 but was released on probation. Her probation officer then revoked her for a lack of verifiable identity, among other things. On May 2, 2000, after 38 days in the Laramie County Jail, she is being transferred.

No one knows who Dimarco is. She rearranges nine digits and offers them as her Social Security number, but it always comes out as invalid or as someone else's number. She is evasive when asked direct questions about her life.

Her evasiveness stems, in part, from her gender identity. Though she has lived her life -- and was sentenced -- as a woman, prison officials had gotten advance word that Dimarco has incomplete male genitalia: a small penis and no testicles. Dimarco is an intersexual -- commonly, but incorrectly, called a hermaphrodite.


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Certificate Could Be Valid If No Legal Action Is Taken

(Muskogee-AP) -- A same-sex couple who sought to wed under Cherokee law may be able to get their marriage application certified when a moratorium on issuing or registering applications is lifted on June 14.

Barring a legal protest, a marriage certificate issued in May to a lesbian couple would be valid.

Attorney Mark Bonney, who is helping the couple, says the Cherokee Nation's law does not define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

It only requires people to be 18 and mentally capable to marry.


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Episcopal Church Growing More Comfortable With Gay Bishop 
by Rachel Zoll
The Associated Press


(New York City) A year after the election of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, the church remains intact -- splintered but not split. Most Episcopalians have stuck with their church and a dissident network of conservatives is growing more slowly than its founders hoped.

And yet the fallout and tension continues, particularly overseas, with worldwide Anglican unity in doubt.

"The church has reached a polarizing crossroads," said the Rev. John Sorenson, a moderate in the conservative Diocese of Albany, N.Y.

"Differences that those of us moderates used to think were a normal part of the church have reached a point where the conservative wing of the church is no longer willing to put up with the liberal wing -- and the conservative wing is intent on winning."