Students protest over gay attacks


Student members of the Queer Collective at the University of Wollongong have been protesting for two days in the form of a sit-in at the main campus.

The students are asking the university to put an end to attacks on gay students, including death threats.

The group says similar attacks have occurred at other universities, including Newcastle and the Bankstown campus of the University of Western Sydney.

Student Daniel Brown says the gay community needs a safe house to protect them against attacks.


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Log Cabin’s conundrum
By Jeremy Quittner

 
Just how much of a voice can gay Republicans expect once they step inside Madison Square Garden for the GOP convention on Monday? The Advocate will bring you daily dispatches from New York, starting with today’s Q & A with Log Cabin Republicans executive director Patrick Guerriero.


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In Florida suit, Justice defends Defense of Marriage Act
The Associated Press


MIAMI -- The U.S. Justice Department asked a judge Friday to dismiss a lawsuit challenging an 8-year-old law banning gay marriage, making it the federal government's first direct legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Attorney General John Ashcroft is fighting a lawsuit filed by four same-sex marriages who argue the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. The law defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman and allows states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said it was the federal government's first direct legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.

The issue of same-sex marriages has become a theme of the presidential race, with President Bush calling call for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, which Democratic challenger John Kerry opposes.


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Michigan elections board again deadlocks on gay marriage amendment


LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- The state elections board again has deadlocked on a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

The Board of State Canvassers, on a 2-2 vote Friday, could not agree on ballot language. It also deadlocked earlier in the week on whether to certify petitions for the measure.


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Anti-Gay Panic Sweeps Poland
Catholic nationalists attack in the streets, the press, universities, and parliament.
By Tomek Kitlinski


WARSAW. Homophobes are on the rampage in Poland, banning or attacking gay pride activities, equating gays with pedophiles in the media, quashing queer studies in universities.

A discredited American "conversion therapist" has been welcomed in the Polish Parliament, while Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," is hailed as a transcendent masterpiece, and used to advance a violent proto-Catholic nationalism, as rabidly anti-Semitic as it is homophobic.

Aggressions have mounted exponentially since Poland joined the European Union on May 1, perhaps a sign of the extreme right's anxiety over its own ability to keep at bay the "corrupting" influence of more liberal Western European countries.