The Ulfian (The Art of Ulf)

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Ukraine: LGBT activists in Kiev hold first ever gay pride march

The event was relatively peaceful despite the attempts by a very small number of individuals to disrupt the occasion.
“This can be considered a historic day,” Elena Semyonova one of the organisers told reporters after the activists held a 20-minute-long march along a street near the centre of the Ukrainian capital.
Witnesses noticed the sober dress of activists who were advised to wear comfortable clothes and shoes that would make their escape easier in the event of an attack by anti-gay protestors or the police.
“Human rights are my pride,” chanted the protestors that included delegations from Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
The peaceful protest was maintained by a heavy police presence surrounding the pro-equality demonstrators.
The district court of Kiev on Thursday made the ruling to ban the gay pride demonstration. The court upheld a lawsuit by city authorities, who had argued that the rally could cause disturbance to annual Kiev Day celebrations, and could set off violence in the city.

Organisers last year cancelled the event at the last minute, as anti-gay protesters gathered at the planned location for the rally, and had intended to attack participants. Subsequently, members of radical groups attacked two leading gay activists.
This news comes shortly after Amnesty International published a report urging the Ukrainian Government to introduce legislation to tackle discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, following a number of attacks.
Last week, a bill to protect gay Ukrainian workers from discrimination based on their sexual orientation was dropped by the country’s parliament, as hundreds of anti-gay protesters gathered to demonstrate against it.
The Ukrainian foreign minister, Leonid Kozhara, promised in February that the country would soon ban all anti-gay discrimination in an interview with a Polish newspaper.
Ukraine is currently governed by the Party of Regions political party who is strongly pro-Russia. Russia is currently passing laws which restrict the freedoms of LGBT citizens, something that the Ukrainian Parliament also examined.

Dozens Of Activists Arrested At Moscow Gay Pride

Authorities in Moscow arrested dozens of gay rights activists on Saturday as they attempted to hold a Gay Pride demonstration.

Sky News reported that at least 30 activists were being held by police after they defied a city order banning such protests.

The activists targeted Russia's lower house of parliament, where lawmakers are considering a bill which would criminalize “public actions aimed at propaganda of pederasty, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism among minors.” It also seeks to ban public events which promote gay rights, such as Gay Pride parades and gay rights demonstrations.

In attempting to unfurl banners denouncing the Kremlin-backed anti-gay legislation, the protesters were attacked by Orthodox Catholic Christian vigilantes carrying icons and crosses.

Earlier this month, a 22-year-old man from Volgograd was allegedly tortured and killed after he came out gay to two male friends he knew since childhood. And last week, Catholic priests in black robes led an attack on a Gay Pride march in Georgia, sending 14 people to the hospital. While 4 men have been arrested, none of them were identified as a member of the clergy.

What hasn't been reported, is the fact these priest organized this protest and even joined forces side by side with neo-nazi skinheads, yelling hate speech and threatening deadly violence against the pride petitioners.

It's nice to know, "Mein Kampf" has become required reading in Catholic seminaries.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Military Maneuvers

Words Of Wisdom From A Founding Father

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."
-- President Thomas Jefferson: in letter to Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 1813

What Was Behind Georgia’s Anti-Gay Rally?

It was a gathering of clergymen worthy of a religious festival: a line of dozens of bearded priests in black robes, with heavy silver crosses hanging on their chests. And yet, you couldn’t imagine a less holy march. The clergymen led a huge mob along the main street of Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, through a police cordon, and toward a small group of visibly nervous young men and women who had set out to mark the International Day Against Homophobia.
“Fuck your mothers,” a priest shouted.
Another priest came armed with a stool. Their followers carried rocks, sticks, and crucifixes. “Kill them! Don’t let them leave alive,” they screamed.
They smashed heads, windows of shops, and a minibus in which activists tried to escape. Twelve people, including three policemen, were seriously injured.
“Before the van arrived, about ten girls—gay rights activists—were being taunted by a growing, frothing mob. A stone was thrown and split a girl’s head open.… This mob was the creation of the Georgian Orthodox Catholic Church and the Georgian government has so far been gutless in standing up to the Church to protect the rights of its citizens. Shame on you, Georgia. Shame on you,” Paul Rimple, a Tbilisi-based journalist, posted on his Facebook page. He later wrote about it for the Moscow Times.
“A Georgian Taliban has been born,” read status updates of other Georgians on Facebook. Some changed their location settings to Iran. But those who opposed the priests and those who cheered them agree that gay rights—an issue, until now, seen as marginal by most Georgians—has become a proxy for a larger conflict.
As I looked through videos and photographs of the attack, I spotted a familiar bearded face in the crowd of angry anti-gay protesters: the excommunicated Orthodox priest Basili Mkalavishvili. A dozen years ago, when I was reporting for the BBC from Georgia, Father Basili, as he is known among his supporters, invited me for a cup of tea in his little church on the outskirts of Tbilisi. He told me he was proud to be cleansing Georgia of “satanic forces.” He wasn’t shy about discussing the techniques he used in his crusade against religious minorities. Hitting Jehovah’s Witnesses with iron crucifixes, he said, was an effective way of fighting them. But, when I asked, he denied raiding their homes.
“That’s not true,” he told me. “We find out where they gather, and then we wait for them outside. When they come out, that’s when we attack them.” He also said that he was thankful to the Georgian police force for their support.
I bet Jesus couldn't be more proud of these faithful disciples.
Can't help wondering why the Pope hasn't said anything about this?

Thursday, May 23, 2013

The Wolverine Trailer #2 2013 Official - Hugh Jackman Movie

Hatred, Meet Technology!

By Nish Gera

We live in a time when the global gay rights movement is more accelerated and visible than ever before. But the march towards equality has its side effects, some of which are evident from the recent anti-gay attacks in New York City. And marriage equality certainly does not mean complete acceptance, as Michelangelo Signorile points out in his piece "Equality's Brutal Backlash".
Homophobia and the transgressions stemming from it can range from the very benign to the brutal. From the barely evident but entirely intended smirk on the face of someone on the street who sees you hold hands with a same-sex partner, to the recent brutal murder of Mark Carson in the heart of Manhattan's most gay-friendly neighborhood.
While incidents on the latter end of the spectrum understandably get the most media attention and a huge outpouring of support from almost anyone with a pulse, many others - that slur, that passing comment, that double entendre - are almost never reported.
Because who wants to appear too angry anyway - the image of the "angry young gay" is so passé. Yet, how many gay people do I know who have never been a victim of gay bashing, walking even the gay-friendliest of cities? None.
Now, Europe is taking the lead on using technology combined with a grassroots movement to track, report and mobilize action against gay bashing. All through a smartphone app called "Bashing" (www.bashing.eu).
The app was created in Brussels in 2012 after a slew of anti-gay incidents, including the murder of a gay man Ihsane Jarfi, which shockingly resembled the brutal killing of Matthew Shepard. The murder made global headlines and shook this very liberal city and country. (Belgium was the second in the world to legalize gay-marriage - in 2003 - and currently has an openly gay Prime Minister.)
The app shows the precise location and date of every incident, records whether it is verbal or physical, and creates a "Bashmap" showing problem areas on an embedded Google map. In Brussels, over a 100 incidents were reported within the first week after the launch of the app. Surprisingly, the locals quickly learned that the aggressions always occurred on busy roads and squares in the city center, like the locations of the recent NYC incidents!
Björn Pius, the co-creator of the app, never expected it to become so popular. Use quickly spread from Belgium to the Netherlands, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. One can even see two "red spots" in the small town of Forli, about ninety miles northwest of San Marino in Italy. (The app is available globally and incidents have been logged on the map in the US and South America as well.)

Björn says that the perpetrators are "mostly young, between the age of 15 and 30, and are driven by an animalistic instinct to display their masculinity and strength."
That common demographic makes dealing with the perpetrators a challenge. But the app has been a cultural phenomenon and helped to bring government attention to the issue. Since its release, Belgian parliament, the police, and local authorities have begun to grapple with a pattern of violence that was previously considered one-off and hard to pin down.
If Mark Carson was not safe on the streets of Greenwich Village in New York City, then none of us is safe. New York is a city that worships diversity, the "non-normal" and the different. No matter how out of fashion it might be, it is a time to be angry - very angry - and channel that anger through every tool at our disposal - including technology.
Because we know that crowd-sourced grassroots movements can topple regimes.
Because you or I could have been Mark Carson.
Because it's fucking 2013!