Florida Agenda

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – On Sunday, LGBT rights activists plan to protest the policy of Olympics officials permitting nations that have anti-LGBT laws to compete in the London 2012 games. “The [International Olympic Committee] should disqualify from the Olympics countries that discriminate against athletes on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, religion/belief, sexual orientation, or gender identity,” said human rights advocate Peter Tatchell.

“The IOC and [London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] have a duty to uphold the Olympic Charter’s commitment to equality for all in sport. They are failing to do so,” he added. Tatchell is calling for Olympic officials to ensure that competing states “make a public statement that LGBT athletes are welcome at London 2012, and that participating nations must not discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

He added that “in over 150 countries, [LGBT] athletes are forced to hide their sexuality in order to get selected and compete, otherwise they would be rejected and possibly face imprisonment. In the absence of laws against homophobic discrimination, victimization and bias against LGBT athletes is endemic in most competing nations.”

Tatchell says that such statesanctioned discrimination should not be rewarded by allowing participation in the 2012 games.

LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM – The former Archbishop of Canterbury has responded to the most prominent gay member of the British government, in a public battle over the Church of England’s positions on marriage equality and other gay rights issues.

Nick Herbert, a Conservative Member of Parliament and the Minister for Police and Criminal Justice, accused the Church last week of “intolerant” language, after Lord Carey—who reigned as Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world’s Anglican Communion from 1991 to 2002— wrote in the Daily Telegraph (UK), “The Government’s fundamental interest in marriage should be confined to preserving an institution in which the raising of the next generation of citizens is stable and secure. Its interest in other kinds of relationship, though it may regard them as of equal esteem, has no pressing importance. To allow the state to interfere in this way in the institution of the family is to establish a very dangerous precedent.”

Herbert, 49—the highest-ranking LGBT person in the United Kingdom— said that he has never felt “more distant” from the Church than now, because of its stands on gay rights. Herbert, who is himself in a civil partnership, said that gay people will interpret Christian leaders’ comments as “judgmental or intolerant.” In a response in the Times of London , Carey said that supporters of “traditional marriage” are the ones facing judgment from gay rights advocates. “It is in fact the supporters of traditional marriage who have been accused of bigotry and homophobia—the kind of intolerant and judgmental language he talks about in his interview,” Carey said.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – A prominent British barrister says that rulings in favor of marriage equality by the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Appeal mean that British churches will soon be compelled to perform same-sex marriages, despite promises to the contrary by Prime Minister David Cameron.

Cameron’s government issued a consultation document last month that said a marriage equality law will “make no changes to religious marriages.” The document said that church marriages “will continue to only be legally possible between a man and a woman.”

Neil Addison, the director of the Thomas More Legal Centre in London, which represents religious and social conservative organizations in court, says this isn’t the case. “The Government will be obliged to permit same-sex marriage on religious premises on exactly the same basis as it permits heterosexual marriage,” said Addison.

“Certainly a good legal case can be made that any place or person who is registered to perform marriage must be willing to perform same-sex marriage on the same basis as they conduct heterosexual marriage since, in law, there will be no difference between the two,” he added.

Addison pointed to the recent decision in a European Court of Human Rights case involving two French lesbians which found that, although no country has an obligation to legalize marriage equality, once such a law is passed, the state must apply it equally to all citizens.

“Churches which perform heterosexual marriages will have to be willing to perform same-sex marriages and they will have no legal grounds to resist since the courts have determined that the ‘orthodox Christian view of marriage’ is not a ‘core’ part of Christian belief,” Addison noted.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM —Queen Elizabeth II addressed both houses of Parliament last week to celebrate 60 years on the British throne. In an address scheduled to mark the sovereign’s diamond jubilee, Speaker of the House of Commons John Brecow raised a few eyebrows when he introduced the 85-year-old monarch as “a kaleidoscope queen of a kaleidoscope country.”

Bercow, 49, is straight and married, but serves as the honorary president of the Kaleidoscope International Diversity Trust, a gay rights group which works to overturn anti-gay legislation across the world and to open dialogues between straight government officials and gay citizens in less tolerant countries.

Telegraph columnist and blogger Damian Thompson suggested that Bercow’s comment was “a thinly disguised plug for gay marriage.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who supports marriage equality, was clearly not amused by Bercow’s remarks, as his expression showed when it was captured on television just moments after the Speaker of Commons’ “kaleidoscopic” comments.

Elizabeth II ascended the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1952. “I am reassured that I am merely the second sovereign to celebrate a diamond jubilee,” the queen told officials. Only one other British monarch, Victoria, celebrated 60 years on the throne, in 1897 (she died in 1901).