German party says schools should teach trans children to accept their ‘biological gender’

Stefanie Gerdes | Gay Star News | January 26, 2016

A branch of Germany’s leading right-wing party is demanding LGBTI people shouldn’t be discriminated against – while implementing discriminating policies themselves.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a Eurosceptic party comparable to Britain’s UK Independence Party, has turned into Germany’s third-biggest party and could clock in 13% of votes at the next election, new research suggests.

Now Polish-German activist Katharina Nocun has publicized parts of the party’s Baden-Württemberg branch’s manifesto on Twitter and her blog – and it shows the AfD’s acceptance of LGBTI people to be more than just limited.

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Gay rights group to open centre for LGBT asylum seekers in Berlin

Magdalena Mis | Reuters | January 26, 2016

LONDON, Jan 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A centre for 125 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum seekers is set to open in Berlin in March.

There are an estimated 3,500 LGBT asylum seekers in Berlin, many experiencing abuse in shelters where they are staying with other people seeking asylum, according to Schwulenberatung, a Berlin-based gay rights organisation which will run the centre.

“We have heard a lot of stories about discrimination and crimes against LGBT people in the last two years,” Stephan Jakel, Schwulenberatung manager in charge of refugee affairs, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Friday.

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Rogue States and Nuclear Dangers

Noam Chomsky. (photo: Va Shiva)

 

Noam Chomsky | Noam Chomsky’s Website | Reader Supported News | October 2, 2015

hroughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”

There are, however, striking exceptions to the general enthusiasm: the United States and its closest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. One consequence of this is that U.S. corporations, much to their chagrin, are prevented from flocking to Tehran along with their European counterparts. Prominent sectors of U.S. power and opinion share the stand of the two regional allies and so are in a state of virtual hysteria over “the Iranian threat.” Sober commentary in the United States, pretty much across the spectrum, declares that country to be “the gravest threat to world peace.” Even supporters of the agreement here are wary, given the exceptional gravity of that threat. After all, how can we trust the Iranians with their terrible record of aggression, violence, disruption, and deceit?

Opposition within the political class is so strong that public opinion has shifted quickly from significant support for the deal to an even split. Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the agreement. The current Republican primaries illustrate the proclaimed reasons. Senator Ted Cruz, considered one of the intellectuals among the crowded field of presidential candidates, warns that Iran may still be able to produce nuclear weapons and could someday use one to set off an Electro Magnetic Pulse that “would take down the electrical grid of the entire eastern seaboard” of the United States, killing “tens of millions of Americans.”

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Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and a mecca for cross dressers and transsexuals where the first male-to-female surgery was performed – until the Nazis came to power, new book reveals

Caroline Howe for MailOnline | Daily Mail | August 8, 2015

• An uninhibited urban gay sexual scene flourished in Berlin, Germany in the wake of World War One
• The science of ‘transsexuality’ was founded at the Institute of Sexual Science where the first male-to-female surgery was performed
• German scientists concluded that same-sex love was a natural, inborn characteristic and not merely the perversion of a ‘normal’ sexual tendency
• There were 30 separate homosexual periodicals
• Cross-dressers found dressmakers who tailored for large sizes and singles searching for gay love could place ads

Think Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray in Carberet. Think West Hollywood, Greenwich Village and Provincetown and the Castro, known as hotbeds of homosexuality.

But they are nothing like the uninhibited urban gay sexual scene and vast homosexual subculture that flourished in Berliin under Germany’s Weimar Republic.

Sexual experimentation between the same sexes and medical advances of helping genders ‘trapped within the wrong body’ in Germany more than one hundred years ago shaped our understanding of gay identity today.

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German Museum Launches Show On 150 Years of Gay History

 

 

Associated Press | South Florida Gay & Lesbian News | June 24, 2015

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s main national history museum is launching an exhibition tracing 150 years of gay history, including the first uses of the term “homosexual” and the brutal Nazi-era repression of gays.

The exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, which is staging it together with the capital’s Gay Museum, has been four years in the planning but opens amid a new debate in Germany over whether to allow full-fledged marriage for gay couples.

Culture Minister Monika Gruetters said at the show’s presentation Wednesday that it “puts the current debate about legal equality into a historical context.” She said it shows “how hard-fought the progress we can speak of today was.”

The exhibition, “Homosexuality—ies,” opens to the public Friday and runs through Dec. 1.

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Trade Agreements Should Not Benefit Industry Only

Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Getty Images)

 

Elizabeth Warren | The Boston Globe | Reader Supported News | June 23, 2015

ecently Hillary Clinton joined Nancy Pelosi and many others in Congress to call on the president to reorient our trade policy so that it produces a good deal for all Americans — not just for a handful of big corporations. Here’s a realistic starting point: Fix the way we enforce trade agreements to ensure a level playing field for everyone. Many of our close allies — major trading partners like Australia, Germany, France, India, South Africa, and Brazil — are already moving in this direction. American negotiators should stop fighting those efforts and start leading them.

We live in a largely free trade world. Over the past 50 years, we’ve opened up countless markets, so that tariffs today are generally low. As a result, modern trade agreements are less about reducing tariffs and more about writing new rules for everything from labor, health, and environmental standards to food safety, prescription drug access, and copyright protections.

Even if those rules strike the right balance among competing interests, the true impact of a trade deal will turn on how well those rules are enforced. And that is the fundamental problem: America’s current trade policy makes it nearly impossible to enforce rules that protect hard-working families, but very easy to enforce rules that favor multinational corporations.

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Berlin Story

Alex Ross | The New Yorker | January 26, 2015

n August 29, 1867, a forty-two-year-old lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs went before the Sixth Congress of German Jurists, in Munich, to urge the repeal of laws forbidding sex between men. He faced an audience of more than five hundred distinguished legal figures, and as he walked to the lectern he felt a pang of fear. “There is still time to keep silent,” he later remembered telling himself. “Then there will be an end to all your heart-pounding.” But Ulrichs, who had earlier disclosed his same-sex desires in letters to relatives, did not stop. He told the assembly that people with a “sexual nature opposed to common custom” were being persecuted for impulses that “nature, mysteriously governing and creating, had implanted in them.” Pandemonium erupted, and Ulrichs was forced to cut short his remarks. Still, he had an effect: a few liberal-minded colleagues accepted his notion of an innate gay identity, and a Bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings. In a pamphlet titled “Gladius furens,” or “Raging Sword,” Ulrichs wrote, “I am proud that I found the strength to thrust the first lance into the flank of the hydra of public contempt.”

The first chapter of Robert Beachy’s “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity” (Knopf) begins with an account of Ulrichs’s audacious act. The title of the chapter, “The German Invention of Homosexuality,” telegraphs a principal argument of the book: although same-sex love is as old as love itself, the public discourse around it, and the political movement to win rights for it, arose in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This message may surprise those who believe that gay identity came of age in London and New York, sometime between the Oscar Wilde trials and the Stonewall riots. The brutal repression of gay people during the Nazi period largely erased German gay history from international consciousness, and even from German memory. Beachy, a historian who teaches at Yonsei University, in Seoul, ends his book by noting that Germans hold gay-pride celebrations each June on what is known as Christopher Street Day, in honor of the street where the Stonewall protest unfolded. Gayness is cast as an American import.

Ulrichs, essentially the first gay activist, encountered censorship and ended up going into exile, but his ideas very gradually took hold. In 1869, an Austrian littérateur named Karl Maria Kertbeny, who was also opposed to sodomy laws, coined the term “homosexuality.” In the eighteen-eighties, a Berlin police commissioner gave up prosecuting gay bars and instead instituted a policy of bemused tolerance, going so far as to lead tours of a growing demimonde. In 1896, Der Eigene (“The Self-Owning”), the first gay magazine, began publication. The next year, the physician Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first gay-rights organization. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a canon of gay literature had emerged (one early advocate used the phrase “Staying silent is death,” nearly a century before aids activists coined the slogan “Silence = Death”); activists were bemoaning negative depictions of homosexuality (Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” was one target); there were debates over the ethics of outing; and a schism opened between an inclusive, mainstream faction and a more riotous, anarchistic wing. In the nineteen-twenties, with gay films and pop songs in circulation, a mass movement seemed at hand. In 1929, the Reichstag moved toward the decriminalization of homosexuality, although the chaos caused by that fall’s stock-market crash prevented a final vote.

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Limited win for surrogacy, gay parenthood in Germany

DW | December 19, 2014

Gay and childless heterosexual German couples seeking to have children by non-traditional means have gained a small victory. If the surrogacy is done abroad, authorities must recognize the couple as the legal parents.

In a landmark case made public on Friday, the German high court in Karlsruhe watered down legislation forbidding surrogacy in Germany.

Although women are still prohibited from using their wombs to bring another couple’s child to term, Germany now has to recognize children born using such procedures abroad.

The case revolved around two gay men whose child was born via surrogate in California. The baby, born in 2010, was registered in the United States as the child of the two men. Upon returning home, the couple had been unable to persuade the German authorities to recognize the child as theirs, though the baby has been living with the fathers in Berlin for the last three-and-a-half years.

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Germany celebrates 25 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall

Germany and Turkey Refuse to Take Part in Bombing ISIS

Middle East Monitor | Reader Supported News | September 15, 2014

ermany and Turkey announced their refusal to take part in US-led airstrikes on ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria.

At a joint press conference with his British counterpart Philip Hammond in Berlin, German foreign minister Frank Stein Mart said that “no one has asked [Germany] to take part [in bombing ISIS]” and asserted that Germany will not take part in the operations. Instead, he called for turning military plans into a political strategy to counter ISIS. He added that Germany is prepared to discuss this strategy on the side-lines of the meeting to be held by G-7 foreign ministers in New York.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry continues to hold meetings with world leaders to coordinate aerial attacks aimed at crushing ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

For his part, UK’s foreign secretary Philip Hammond confirmed that his country will not take part in the operations but that it supports the formation of an international alliance against ISIS.

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