LGBTQ

Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual rights

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US radical feminists team up with fundamentalist bigots

The US radical feminist group Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF) have teamed up with the Family Policy Alliance, a section of Focus on the Family, to fight against a federal protection for transgender people in the education system. Title IX was written to protect women and girls from discrimination on the basis of sex in education programmes or activities that receive federal funding. The bone of contention is that the legal category of “sex” in Title IX has recently been changed to “gender identity”. This means that schools which discriminate against transgender people will no longer be able to...

Russian Parliament sanctions domestic violence

10,000 women in Russia die of domestic violence every year. 40% of all serious violent crime in Russia and over 25% of murders take place in the home. Around 36,000 women are victims of domestic violence every day, and so too are 26,000 children. These are the official statistics. The real statistics will be far higher. Many women do not report incidents of domestic violence, either for fear of repercussions from their husband or partner, or because complaints are often ignored by the police. Children have even less chance of securing legal protection against domestic violence. That provides...

Alt-right threat opposed at Berkeley

Milo Yiannopoulos is an editor at Breitbart, a news site of the so-called alt-right. He is a self-described “super villain”, a viciously right-wing internet troll who publicly attacks women, black people, Muslims, immigrants. Unsurprisingly he is a great supporter of Donald Trump. So bad is he, he is permanently banned from Twitter. He is currently making a hugely controversial speaker tour, and hit the mainstream news when his planned appearance at UC Berkeley was cancelled due to the protests against it. There is now a debate on whether this cancellation was an attack on free speech. The alt...

LGBT rights: Corbyn’s critics are wrong

At a recent LGBT History Month event, Jeremy Corbyn said that “Our defence of you is a defence of all of humanity and the right of people to practise the life they want to practise, rather than be criminalised, brutalised and murdered, simply because they chose to be gay, they chose to be lesbian, they were LGBT in any form.” News outlets described this as a “gaffe” with some getting up in arms about the idea of homosexuality being a “choice” rather than something people are born with. There is not enough scientific evidence either way regarding whether being homosexuality is something we are...

Stop Trump: On the streets against the “Muslim ban”

Organise, on the streets and in the labour movement! Argue for socialist, democratic, internationalist ideas which offer a real answer both to Trump’s rancid, right-wing, regression, and to the discredited status quo. That is how we can block Trump.

A trip to Israel and Palestine

Last year I visited two countries — Israel and Palestine — about which I had discussed so much and yet seen so little. On a four-day trip organised by the Union of Jewish Students we visited different parts of Israel, including the Golan Heights, and made a short sojourn to Palestine, mainly Ramallah. It was a trip that was primarily organised to discuss the political issues around the Middle East. To many it will have been disgraceful that I even visited Israel. Had I gone on a visit to my country of birth, a country that punishes homosexuality by execution, and hangs any Muslim who becomes...

Why police failed to catch “Grindr serial killer”

The conviction of Stephen Port for the murder of four young men has raised a number of questions over the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into the deaths. The police failed to link the deaths of the men, two of whom were found in the same place in a Barking Graveyard a few weeks apart. The police also failed to properly investigate the earlier case of student Anthony Walgate, who was found dead outside Port’s flat. Port was questioned by police, but his explanation that Walgate had taken drugs and died and that, in a panic, Port had put him outside of his flat, was accepted. Police only...

Fidel Castro — no hero of ours

Fidel Castro, one of the last remaining leaders of a Stalinist state, died last week at the age of 90. Among sections of the left there is near-hysterical outpouring of eulogy, while bourgeois commentators blithely dismiss him as a communist despot. A third camp socialist assessment of Castro’s politics is needed. Fidel Castro was undoubtedly the central historical figure of modern Cuban history. The 1959 revolution that brought his 26 July Movement (M26J) to power was a bourgeois political revolution which smashed Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, but replaced it with their own Bonapartist...

Pardon not good enough?

A private members Bill which would have pardoned up to 15,000 living gay men who have a criminal record due to the defunct Sexual Offences Act was recently talked out of Parliament by Tory Minister Sam Gyimah. By speaking for 25 minutes he ensured the Bill ran out of time and was not voted on. He argued the government had already agreed to let gay men apply for their convictions to be disregarded and had introduced a posthumous “pardoning process.” Gyimah argued the Bill would have allowed pardoning for actions that remain crimes, e.g. would pardon those who had sex with someone under the...

Solidarity with LGBT Cameroonians!

In 78 countries around the world, homosexuality or homosexual activity of some kind is a crime. 38 of these are in Africa. And Cameroon has the highest number of arrests for homosexuality in the world. On 13 October 2016, there were mass arrests in a gay club in the capital, Yaounde. All of the arrestees have since been released. Some readers may have come across the incredibly moving film Call Me Kuchu, which documents the LGBT rights movement in Uganda. While the film was being made, the prominent LGBT activist and human rights campaigner David Kato was murdered by homophobes. There are...

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