The rampaging Westboro Baptist Church fundamentalist kooks are set to picket the funeral of the late African-American Democrat Congresswoman for Ohio, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who died recently of a brain aneurysm after representing her district for the last ten years. Tubbs Jones was a strong LGBT rights ally, whose golden legislative record included support for LGBT […]

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Christian Right watchers wondered if the Maxim Institute was going to front up with an nzvotes series of candidate meetings and websites. Well, the website is still under reconstruction, but the candidate meetings themselves seem strangely off.
As I’ve noted in previous blogs and Gaynz.Com Politics and Religion columns on the Maxim Institute’s profile since 2005, […]

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 Sometimes, in New Zealand’s public places, one gets a whiff of annoying fundamentalist street preachers. When I was in my twenties, there was a particularly stupid fake American ex-surfie called Ray Comfort who used to whinge about abortion and homosexuality in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square.
While I think these people are rabid rabble rousers, I think Norway […]

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Iris Robinson is a (fundamentalist) Democratic Unionist Party MP for the Northern Irish electorate of Strangford. Elected in 2001, she has become somewhat of a bete noire for LGBT Britons, especially those in Northern Ireland.
She describes herself as “born again” , attends the Metropolitan Tabernacle Belfast (Elim, Pentecostal) and argues that the government “must” support […]

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It’s been some time since I covered the ongoing struggles of those brave young women at “Mercy Survivors” in Sydney, who are battling against a questionable Pentecostal ‘medical and social service provider’ entitled “Mercy Ministries,” which is also active in New Zealand.
This time, I thought I’d discuss the experiences of one young woman who experienced […]

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Elizabeth Pisani: The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS: New York: WW Norton: 2008.
New Zealanders can pride ourselves on taking a sober, serious stance toward HIV/AIDS prevention over the last quarter-century, but what about elsewhere in the world?
Pisani’s book is especially interesting because she spent some time working alongside waria (transgender) […]

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And in a mixed bag this morning, there are events aplenty in Canada, as federal Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepares for a general election which his party may not even win, after only a single term of office.
It is uncertain what this will mean for Onsite, the recovery and detoxification facility that is part […]

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On Saturday, Ottawa lesbians engaged in their annual Dyke March, at the same time that a group of fundamentalist kids were engaging in a predictable attention-grabbing stunt designed to attract attention to the anti-abortion movement.
Unusually for fundamentalists, they’ll be taping their mouths shut, allegedly to impersonate embryos or fetuses, which will occur without meal breaks. […]

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While the Maxim Institute has announced that it intends to resurrect its nzvotes website to provide information for centre-right voters about the forthcoming election, its parties and candidates, the organisation continues to steadily diverge from the New Zealand Christian Right.
Case in point- Steve Thomas’ new paper, Governing for the Good: What Does It Mean?  While […]

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While perusing Cleis Press’ excellent online catalogue, I was struck by three fascinating titles about bygone dykes.
March Hastings’ Three Women (1958) is about a lesbian love triangle. Paula marries Phil at eighteen to escape from her ghastly New York tenement life with an alcoholic dad, but falls in love with Byrne, his artist aunt, who […]

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