NewsWrap for the week ending March 10, 2012

SUMMARY

Emo to the Slaughter - Multiple sources report that as many as a hundred young people perceived to be LGBT have been brutally murdered by religious militia in Iraq during the last month …

Scapegoated in Syria - the UK's "Pink News" reports that an inflammatory article in a popular newspaper in Syria claims that gays have been "prospering" from the uprising against the entrenched regime of President Bashar al-Assad …

Your EU Wears Army Boots - Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko responds to comments by Germany's openly gay Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle that Lukashenko's government is the "last dictatorship in Europe" by saying that it's "better to be a dictator than gay" …

Papal Army Recruited, Indulgences Offered? - Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI continues his crusade against marriage equality with a warning to visiting American bishops this week of "the powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage" …

Incitement to Riot - two senior Roman Catholic bishops in the UK tell parishioners that they have a "duty" to "ensure" that same-gender couples are never allowed to marry, while comments by Scotland's Roman Catholic Cardinal Keith O'Brien calling the idea of marriage equality "grotesque" are applauded by Zimbabwe's state-run "Herald" newspaper …

Hush Little Baby, Don't Say a Word - what's come to be known as the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Tennessee, which would ban any discussion of homosexuality in public schools, continues to percolate in the US state's legislature …

Don't Ask, Don't Teach - Utah lawmakers pass legislation that not only bans classroom discussion of homosexuality, but also of contraception and sexual activity outside of marriage, and requires any school sex education to be abstinence-only, all of which one opposing legislator calls "a mandate against reality" ….

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