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 | | From: | Dennis Lewis | | Subject: | Honduras resists global acceptance of same-sex marriage | | Date: | Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:41:25 GMT |
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 | Reed Johnson filed a report in today's L.A. Times on the movement to
amend Honduras' constitution to ban same- marriage.
(URL on one line, and free registration required to read article for
the next 7 days.)
Excerpts from Johnson's article, datelined Tegucigalpa:
.... "In various countries of the world -- Holland, Spain, various
states of the United States -- there is already [same-] marriage,"
[veteran congressman Jose Celin] Discua says. "It is already coming,
and it is already accepted."
But not in this impoverished, crime-racked Central American nation of
6.8 million. In October, Discua sponsored a congressional motion to
ban marriage and adoption by homouals. Strongly backed by the
country's swelling evangelical Christian movement, as well as the
Roman Catholic Church, the motion passed unanimously.
If the measure passes a second legislative vote, as required by
federal law, the constitution will be amended to read that marriage
only between a man and a woman is legally valid.
.... Marriage rights aren't a high priority for Honduran rights
activists, but the proposed constitutional ban has mobilized them
against what they see as another attempt to relegate and lesbian
Hondurans to second-class citizenship. The activists say they're fed
up with job discrimination, police bruality, hate crimes, and the
media's stereotyping of them as prostitutes, junkies and delinquents.
.... "The same political campaign that Bush [started] is what" Honduran
conservatives are doing, says Edgardo Javier Medina, 43, of the
rights group Kukulkan. "It is the same line against homouals."
.... Honduras' community, like those of most Central American
countries, is small and politically weak by U.S. or European
standards. Though homouality is not illegal, only about 5,000
people belong to the country's eight or so rights organizations.
There are no identifiably "" neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa, a city
of more than 1 million, Medina says.
.... "The papers here in our country have been very coarse, very
stupid. They have been very yellow," says Marco Antonio Lopez,
coordinator general of the Violet Collective, the nation's oldest
rights group. "These crude conservatives ... are not bothering us a
great deal, more when we are in [an election] year."
.... The rev. Oswaldo Canales, president of the Evangelical Fraternity
of Honduras, which represents 98 percent of the country's estimated 2
million evangelicals, ... believes that homouality is one of
several behaviors destroying traditional Honduran family life, which,
he acknowledges, has its own grave problems. He believes lesbianism is
increasing because of heteroual domestic violence against women, a
byproduct of what he disapprovingly calls a macho culture.
Canales, who has preached at the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles and
will be attending a White House breakfast with Bush in February, also
says the controversy over marriage in the U.S. has helped shape
the debate in Latin nations. ...
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