LGBT Family-Inclusive Immigration Bills Need Your Help

June 2, 2009

LGBT Family-Inclusive Immigration Bills Need Your Help

Dear Families and Friends,

Tomorrow morning at 10:00am EST, Wednesday, June 3, the Senate Judiciary Committee will convene the first-ever hearing on inequality for same-sex couples in federal immigration law. The Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) is long overdue legislation that will end current discriminatory immigration policy by allowing American citizens to sponsor their same-sex partners for residency in the United States.

Jennifer Chrisler, Executive Director of the Family Equality Council, submitted testimony on behalf of binational same-sex couples raising children. The Family Equality Council is proud to participate in efforts to educate Congress and reform immigration inequities to include LGBT families. A special thanks goes out to our partners at Immigration Equality, the lead organizational advocate on this bill. (Read Family Equality Council's full statement on the UAFA hearings and testimony here.)

Reuniting Families Act

Meanwhile, Representative Mike Honda (D-CA), a longtime champion of the LGBT community, will soon introduce the Reuniting Families Act. This landmark immigration bill ends harmful practices--such as long visa wait times and discrimination against LGBT families--that prevent loving families from being together.

Congressman Honda's inclusion of same-sex couples as part of this remarkable legislation marks the first time in Congressional history that same-sex couples have been included as part of a multi-issue immigration bill. As our country begins a conversation about comprehensive immigration reform, this important first step helps to ensure that inequalities facing binational LGBT families are included in the discussion. Our families can be part of fixing our nation's broken immigration system by supporting Congressman Honda's efforts.

With these two important bills moving in Congress, it's crucial that we act now to end discrimination against LGBT families in immigration law.

Please call your U.S. Representative and ask him or her to cosponsor the Reuniting Families Act.

Dial the Capital Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to be directly connected to your Representative. (If you don’t know who your representative is you can find out at www.congressmerge.com).

Then forward this message to 10 friends and family members. We need all hands on deck to ensure our families are included in comprehensive immigration reform.

For more information on the Uniting American Families Act and to watch tomorrow's hearings live, visit Immigration Equality's Blog.

My Neighbors sent us this message today...

Daniel and Milton,

Remember in these times , it is best to keep it simple...

Simple Gifts
"Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free, 'tis a gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
To turn, turn, will be our delight,
'til by turning, turning we come round right."
Bracket

When we go to that quiet place to calm the exterior noise and breathe in peace for the mind and heart, there is no christian, no muslim, no hindu, no budha, no ba'hi only the peace of oneness, interconnectedness....

love,
J and D

Life Only Gets Worse for LGBT Iraqis

Subject: Life Only Gets Worse for LGBT Iraqis.

Please forward it.

http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=features&sc3=&id=91976


Life Only Gets Worse for LGBT Iraqis

by Seth Michael Donsky
EDGE Contributor
Tuesday Jun 2, 2009

Two young gay men were found dead recently in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum, wearing diapers and women’s lingerie--at least according to reports. The bodies of four other men, beaten to death, were discovered by Iraqi police, each bearing signs reading "pervert" in Arabic on their chests. Additionally several coffee shops in Sadr, that were popular with gay Iraqis have been set on fire recently.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs believes as many as 30 people have been killed in Iraq in the last three months because they were gay or perceived to be gay. In an open letter posted on its website, the human rights group Amnesty International has called upon Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take "urgent and concerted action" to end the violence against the Iraqi gay community.

John T. Fleming, who heads public affairs for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, takes pains to point out that homosexuality is not a crime in Iraq. "Homosexuality," he pointed out in a recent e-mail to EDGE, "is outlawed by more than 85 countries and is punishable by death in several Islamic states... but Iraq is not one of them."

The fact that homosexuality is not a crime punishable by death "would be an interesting fact if the law, or the rule of law, mattered in Iraq," counters Scott Long, director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Rights Program. "As it stands, there is no law against being Sunni, but it doesn’t stop Sunnis from being killed. In fact, the violence against gays is widespread."

Long recently returned from a fact-finding mission on the ground in Iraq, where he found reports of targeted violence that dovetail with those coming out of Iraq for several years. "It’s been almost impossible, though, for us, or any other human rights organizations to verify them fully by making contact with eyewitnesses, victims, or others who could testify to them directly," he ruefully adds. "This time, we were able to find people who had accounts of violence they had experienced and it seemed incumbent on us to go to Iraq to speak to as many of them as possible and see how we could help."

As a consequence of the horrific reports coming out of the country, Human Rights Watch has been organizing ways for as many LGBT Iraqis as possible to get out of the country. If the evacuation sounds like attempts to get Jews out of Germany in the late 1930s--well, the situation may be not quite as dire, but certainly compares in the eyes of some observers.

Long describes the situation on the ground for LGBT Iraqis as a "crackdown" targeting both men who have sex with men and men who are merely seen as "effeminate." The latest series of incidents began in late February-into-early March.

He says that it appears to be primarily driven by the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, known as Sadrists. Now, other militias have been joining in.

Long spoke face to face with over 25 survivors of violence from Baghdad and other cities, including Najaf, Basra and Samarra. Those survivors testified to brutal killings - sometimes of their friends and boyfriends, to abductions, to gang rapes by kidnappers, and to torture by militias to get victims to name names of other homosexuals, to death threats and to murder attempts.

Longs states that the Sadrists primarily went underground when the U.S. surge began but that they are now trying to regroup and recoup their political influence. There is speculation that attacking gays is a way of their recasting themselves as moral crusaders. Some observers have compared it to what the Republican party did here in the early ’90’s with their defense of marriage legislation. "I

However, the Sadrists, like most militias, are loosely defined groups and definite accountability for the killings is difficult to trace. "What is clear," says Long, "is that this is an organized and extensive murder campaign and must involve some degree of high-level direction."

Long reports that people from the Sunni areas of Baghdad, or Sunni cities such as Samarra or Diyala, also spoke of the involvement of groups such as Al-Qaeda militias to see who can kill the most homosexuals, to see who can be the "most righteous," the most bathed in blood.

Long does not believe that the killings are part of a religious fatwa, as many have claimed or speculated. "Nobody in Iraq needs a fatwa to kill people they don’t like," says Long. "Although there are substantiated reports that Shi’ite mosques started preaching about the dangers of homosexuality earlier this years in neighborhoods such as Medinat Sadr and Karrada," strong Sadrist centers, "they do not appear to have directly called for killing. The orders to exterminate, if there were orders, came from high in the militia leadership and were political orders, not fatwas, per se."

It is true that Ayatollah Sistani carried a fatwa on his website in 2005 that restated Quranic doctrine on the death penalty for liwat, or homosexual conduct. Long believes, however, that the publicity this has received in the West has misinterpreted--somewhat--what a fatwa is.

"Sistani’s website," Long says, "is effectively an advice column, with answers to random questions forwarded to him over the internet by thousands of ordinary folks. Junior imams in his service provide many of the answers. The ’fatwa’ was in answer to one such question It was buried in a back section of his website and was never publicized on the site by Sadr’s followers or even by the Iraqi press.

Most of the publicity it received was given to it by Western activists." Most of the Iraqis Long spoke to who know of the fatwa at all knew of it only from Western sources.


http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Online Fundraising - we need to raise £10.000 GBP for safe houses in Iraq

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/event.php?eid=84027150924
--------------------

To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1016047817629&mid=8ef31fG2c4faed8G1b4dd29G0