From a Family Law Draft Enabling Gay Marriage to a University’s Anti-LGBT Seminar, This Week in Int’l LGBT News – SouthFloridaGayNews.com
This week read about a new family law draft that could grant same-sex couples to marry in Cuba, and a university in Africa criticized for its hurtful seminar against transgender and intersex people.
New Family Law Draft Could Mean Gay Marriage
The draft of a new Cuban family law suggests enabling same-sex couples to marry and adopt, as well as giving children more say in important choices.
The preliminary proposal, which Cuba’s parliament must approve before going to a grassroots referendum, comes almost three years after the island’s communist government backed down from enshrining gay marriage provisions in its new constitution due to resistance.
The constitutional proposal to modify the definition of marriage from a partnership of a man and woman to a union of “two people … with absolutely equal rights and obligations” was met with opposition from evangelical organizations.
“We consider this version to be consistent with the constitutional text, and develop and update the various legal-family institutions in correspondence with the humanistic nature of our social process,” Justice Minister Óscar Silveira Martínez said in announcing the draft, according to Loop News.
University Of Cape Town Under Fire After ‘Hurtful’ Seminar
University of Cape Town. Photo via Facebook.
The Gender Diversity Coalition has called on the University of Cape Town (UCT) to take immediate action, claiming that the university’s recent seminar on science and LGBT was harmful to the transgender and intersex communities, which certain doctors often malign.
According to Times Live, the coalition criticized Dr. Kgomotso Mathabe, a practicing urologist and a member of the Steven Bike Academic Hospital’s gender clinic. In addition, the coalition stated that the seminar provided misinformation about intersex-born children.
“Intersex is a potentially life-threatening condition. And what intersex is in its simplest terms is when a baby is born, we must be able to look at the genitals, the external genitals of the baby, and be able to say whether it’s a boy or a girl,” said Mathabe.