Czech senators go after same-sex parents

UK election ends 14 years of terrible Conservative rule; will things be better for LGBTs?

🇨🇿 Czechia: A group of conservative senators is attempting to introduce a bill that would make it a crime for same-sex couples to conceive children via IVF (or for doctors to allow it), and would ban same-sex couples from fostering children. This doesn’t seem likely to go anywhere, given that parliament just legalizing same-sex couple adoption earlier this year, but the senators seem determined to address what they consider to be an unethical way to create a child.

May I make a modest proposal? Since sending that child’s parents to jail for the crime of creating it seems like it would turn the supposed harms to the child into actual harms, have the senators considered that maybe the logical punishment for IVF should be to jail the child instead? After all, if its creation was the crime, why should they let the child roam free?

 

🇸🇰 Slovakia: The Human Rights Institute has filed a criminal complaint against the minister of culture, after she gave several interviews in which she spouted racist shit about not enough white babies being born in Europe because LGBT people don’t have kids. Not mentioned: if LGBT Slovaks do have kids, her government won’t recognize them as parents.

🇵🇱 Poland: Maybe that civil union bill isn’t so certain after all? The conservative wing of the governing coalition is now floating that it may introduce its own bill for an even weaker version of civil unions, which they boast will be less likely to be vetoed by the President.

🇳🇦 Namibia: LGBT activists have vowed to take the government to court over its proposed bill to ban same-sex marriage, should it be passed into law.

🇪🇨 Ecuador: A verdict is expected in a lesbian maternity case on July 15. The case is complicated by the fact that Ecuadorian law does not recognize same-sex parents.

Elections…

🇬🇧 UK: 14 years of Conservative rule are finally over, as Labor won a landslide victory in yesterday’s election. While the change is likely to be for the better for LGBT Britons, don’t expect miracles under new PM Starmer, who’s spent much of the election defending trans-exclusionary policies. We’ll see how this shakes out over the next four years, but issues we should look toward are: a conversion therapy ban, a revised gender recognition scheme, and possibly extending same-sex unions of some sort to the overseas territories.

By the time you’re reading this, Starmer will already be Prime Minister, because the UK has figured out this democracy thing better than America. He became Prime Minister after being given permission to form government by the King, because pobody’s nerfect.

🇫🇷 France: The second round of parliamentary elections is on Sunday, and the far right is still apparently headed toward a big victory.

🇮🇷 Iran: The runoff presidential election is today, and while a reform candidate is running, don’t expect miracles for LGBT people if he wins.

🇺🇸 Meanwhile, in the States…

Texas: The Texas Supreme Court ruled that a judge can pursue a case against the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which sanctioned her for refusing to marry same-sex couples.

This doesn’t mean that the bigot judge won. It means that the bigot judge is allowed to pursue her case even though lower courts told her she can’t. The case still needs to be tried on the merits. She’ll have to prove that the SCJC violated her right to religious freedom when it reprimanded her for refusing to conduct same-sex marriages, while the SCJC will have to show that there’s a clear interest on not allowing the appearance (or, in this case, fact) of a two-tiered system of justice caused by a bigoted judge refusing to perform a service for a class of people.

Could this undo same-sex marriage? Not likely. At most, if the bigot judge succeeds, it would seem to extend a right to discriminate against same-sex couples, which the Supreme Court already ruled for in the 303 Creative case, to public servants.