NewsWrap for the week ending September 14th, 1996 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #442, distributed 09-16-96) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Ron Buckmire, Rex Wockner, Alan Reekie, Bjorn Skolander, Andy Quan and Greg Gordon] A gay Air Canada employee has lost his court bid to gain death benefits for his partner, but the same tribunal urged the Canadian government to make them possible. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling came this week in the case of Niels Laessoe and his partner Ronald Sowden. Earlier this year, Canada enacted national civil rights protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation. But in Canada, pensions -- unlike other employee benefits, such as health care -- are regulated by the federal government as part of the Income Tax Act. In the eyes of the Tribunal, the federal law actually prohibits the company from granting equal spousal benefits to an employee's same-gender domestic partner. But the ruling went on to say, "We urge the federal government to act swiftly to amend the legislation that prevents employers such as Air Canada from extending benefits to same-sex spouses." The gay and lesbian advocacy group EGALE promised to lobby the government to make that change, and to continue to challenge the law in court if necessary. Britain's largest gay and lesbian community newspaper and a major association of trade unions this week staged a joint project to bring visibility to the issue of homophobia in the workplace. In a three-day campaign called "Out the Bad Boss", London's "Pink Paper" and the Trade Union Center operated a toll-free hotline staffed by experts in employment rights. Britain is estimated to have well over a million gay and lesbian workers, and they are not legally protected from discrimination based on sexual orientation. September 10th was a historic day in U.S. gay and lesbian history. The U.S. Senate, which had never before voted on a specifically gay and lesbian bill, voted on two: ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, to establish federal civil rights protections against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation, and DOMA, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, to deny recognition to gay and lesbian couples at both the federal and state levels. On the same day, the legal defense of marriage discrimination began in a Hawaii courtroom, in the case that prompted both DOMA and the introduction of similar measures in 70 percent of the U.S. states this year. [more] As expected, DOMA passed the Senate by a landslide 85-to-14 vote, an even greater margin than the 5-to-1 by which it had previously passed the House. All 14 nay votes came from Democrats. DOMA would both empower the states to ignore legal same gender marriages another state might someday perform and for all federal purposes restrict the definitions of "marriage" and "spouse" to legally-married heterosexual couples only. President Clinton has already promised to sign this bill into law, although DOMA's passage sparked a series of gay and lesbian protests across the country intended to change his mind. One protest outside the White House led to the arrest of nine gay men for demonstrating without a permit in a planned action of civil disobedience. They were quickly released. Without DOMA, ENDA would never have made it to the Senate floor. ENDA's debate and vote resulted from a procedural compromise after Democrats proposed to attach it as an amendment to DOMA. It was rejected by a single vote, 50-to-49. The only Senator who didn't vote was with his hospitalized son at the time, but he was generally expected to support ENDA. If he had, it would have passed with a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Al Gore. This was a remarkable performance for a first hearing on a civil rights measure, especially before a Congress that's been dismantling other measures against workplace discrimination. That gives both the Clinton administration and many gays and lesbians hope for its future passage. DOMA and similar bills on the state level were all proposed in reaction to the possibility of same-gender marriages becoming legal in Hawaii. The Hawaii state Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that to deny marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples constituted gender-based discrimination in violation of Hawaii's equal rights amendment. That ruling sent the case back to trial court, where hearings began this week. In this case, the burden is on the state to prove that it has a "compelling" interest in restricting marriage to heterosexual couples only. Hawaii Deputy Attorney General Rick Eichor's strategy has been that the state's compelling interest lies in promoting the optimum environment for children, and that it's married biological parents who do that. The state presented its case this week with four witnesses billed as "experts" testifying to that effect, but counsel for the one gay and two lesbian couples who are the plaintiffs was able to score important points from each on cross-examination. The second day of testimony was interrupted by a bomb threat which proved to be a hoax. The plaintiffs will present their case in the coming week. Australia's High Court this week heard a lawsuit seeking to overturn sodomy laws in the island state of Tasmania -- the last such laws on the books in Australia. Although there have been no prosecutions for 15 years, the laws provide for sentences of up to 25 years in prison for private homosexual acts between consenting adults. An international tribunal agreed with Tasmanian gay activists that the laws' chilling effect violates treaties to which Australia is a signatory. That decision led Australia to pass a national privacy law, intended to protect any potential defendants without challenging states' rights. The Tasmanian government has clung stubbornly to its criminal code, while activists led by Rodney Croome have been equally stubborn in pursuing the laws' repeal for eight years. Sodomy reform was a condition of Romania's admission to the Council of Europe in 1993, but this week the lower house of the Romanian Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, voted instead by a margin of more than 8-to-1 to reaffirm the Ceausescu-era statute. The Chamber of Deputies' vote serves to retain Romania's existing criminalization of all "sexual relations between persons of the same sex" -- even those between consenting adults in private. The Senate, the upper house of Parliament, had voted last month to restrict criminal penalties to only those same-gender sex acts committed in public or causing a public scandal, providing for sentences of one to five years imprisonment. The Deputies also voted for that same "public scandal" measure, but were not willing to decriminalize any homosexual acts at all. As a "compromise", the Chamber agreed to penalize private homosexual acts with slightly lower sentences: six months to three years in prison. The differences between the versions passed in the two houses may be worked out as soon as the coming week, with every possibility that the broader definition of the crime will be the final one. The Chamber of Deputies also affirmed a clause previously approved by the Senate to penalize organizing, associating or proselytizing for homosexual acts with one to five years in prison. They did not adopt a proposal to criminalize all non-procreative sex acts. The parliamentary proceedings in Romania are influenced by both politics and religion. An election is scheduled for November, and the Christian Democratic party has taken a firm stand against sodomy reform. Four out of five Romanians are influenced by the Orthodox Church, which has vocally opposed reform, calling homosexuality "a scourge that perverts society". Openly gay U.S. skating champ Rudy Galindo announced this week that he's abandoning his amateur status to skate professionally. He'll be starting his new career in the coming week with tours of Brazil and Canada, and his first pro competition will come in late October. Galindo says he's more than met his goals as an amateur and looks forward to new challenges as a professional. In a stunning performance in January, Galindo won the U.S. national men's singles championship, making him a hot property for the professional market. Galindo revealed his sexual orientation in a book about skating published earlier this year. Now he's working on a book of his own, the autobiography "Icebreaker", which is also planned for production as a made-for-TV movie. And finally, U.S. media are all a-twitter over the possibility that, for the first time, the title character in a network TV sitcom may come out as a lesbian: the character "Ellen Morgan" in ABC-TV's "Ellen", played by comic Ellen DeGeneres. An upcoming issue of "TV Guide" confidently predicts the revelation early in the season now starting. But under intense media pressure, executives stopped stonewalling and started backpedaling, until the outing became a "maybe", and certainly not until later on. There are definitely jokes scripted that will tease the audience on the subject, and the rumor alone may boost the show against tough new competition in its timeslot. The further question is what all this might mean for the real-life Ellen DeGeneres -- to date, she's staunchly kept her personal life private, but she's long been the subject of rumors in gay and lesbian circles. Sources for this week's report included: The Associated Press; The Hollywood Reporter; Reuter News Service; Daily Variety; The Canadian Broadcasting Company; The Pink Paper/London; EuroQueer Digest; Lesbian Gay New York (LGNY); The Anchorage Daily News; United Press International; Hearst News Syndicate; USA Today; The San Francisco Chronicle; The Honolulu Advertiser; The Honolulu Star Bulletin; The Philadelphia Inquirer; The Boston Globe; and cyberpress releases from the International Lesbian & Gay Association; Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund; Family Research Council; American Family Association; American Jewish Congress; Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; National Gay & Lesbian Task Force; Log Cabin Republicans; Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches; Parents & Friends of Lesbians & Gays; Victory Fund; Human Rights Campaign; ACT UP/Washington, D.C.; American Civil Liberties Union; and Hawaii Equal Rights Marriage Project.