Sweden’s Lutheran church, the Church of Sweden, has decided to conduct gay weddings in the Nordic country from Nov. 1. “We are the first major church to do this,” said Kristina Grenholm, the church’s director of theology. The decision came after the Swedish parliament earlier this year passed legislation allowing homosexuals to legally marry, changing a previous law permitting legal unions but not formal marriage.

“For my part, the right decision was taken, but I can empathise with the many who believe this has gone too fast,” Archbishop of Sweden Anders Wejryd told a news conference.

Sweden’s Lutheran church, which split from the state in 2000 but remains the country’s largest religious community, had previously said it was open to registering same-sex unions but wanted to reserve the term matrimony for heterosexual marriages.

Read the whole article here.

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It’s hard to watch France’s political and cultural elite rush to support filmmaker Roman Polanski against extradition to the United States on a decades-old sex charge and not wonder exactly how they interpret the national motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” It’s tempting to ask whether they’re defending the liberty to break the law and skip town, respecting the equality of all before the law and championing a brotherhood of artists who can do no wrong.

(Photo: Roman Polanski, 19 Feb 2009/Hannibal Hanschke)

Here in Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner declared the arrest was “a bit sinister … frankly, (arresting) a man of such talent recognised around the world, recognised in the country where he was arrested — that’s not very nice.” He and his Polish counterpart have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the issue. Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said “just as there is a generous America that we like, there’s also an America that scares us, and that’s the America that has just shown us its face.” Directors, actors and intellectuals have been signing a petition demanding Polanski’s immediate release.

Almost all the focus is on the argument that Polanski is a brilliant director, the charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year old dates back to 1977 and the victim herself says she wants the whole issue to be forgotten.  Almost completely ignored is the fact that he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing, which added a crime to the original crime. There is such a widespread assumption that all artists and intellectuals would automatically support Polanski that Paris papers today — both the left-of-centre Libération and the conservative Le Figaro — wrote with an air of surprise that Hollywood was not storming the barricades to back him.

The French Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit made headlines by bucking the trend and saying he was “ill at ease” with the rush to absolve Polanski of raping a minor and the culture minister should have been more cautious in his comments.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, Hollywood’s hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, reviewed the objections by Polanski’s supporters and concluded: “Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country … the Justice Department and L.A.’s district attorney are right to seek extradition.”

And almost nobody in the media here in France asks the tough questions that Fr. Tom Reese, S.J. (photo at right) did in his Washington Post blog post entitled “Father Polanski would go to jail”:
“Polanski’s defenders … argue that he should not be punished. They say that the girl was willing and sexually experienced and she has forgiven him (after receiving a settlement). They even cite his tragic childhood and life as an excuse. And besides, it is ancient history. Such arguments from paedophile priests would be laughed out of court and lambasted by everyone, and rightly so…

“The Catholic Church has rightly been put under a microscope when 4 percent of its priests were involved in abuse, but what about the film industry? The world has truly changed. Entertainment is the new religion with sex, violence and money the new Trinity. The directors and stars are worshipped and quickly forgiven for any infraction as long as the PR agent is as skilled as a saintly confessor. Entertainment, not religion, is the new opiate of the people and we don’t want our supply disturbed.

“Is there a double standard here? You bet.”

There’s a lot to say about the different ways Americans and French approach the law. But let’s go right to Tom Reese’s question. Do you think Polanski’s supporters cut him slack they wouldn’t think of permitting for a paedophile priest? Is the entertainment industry setting our values?

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Indonesian artist Agus Suwage knows what it is like to run up against the religious conservatives. Four years ago, he was hauled into parliament, where lawmakers accused him of blasphemy and of producing pornography dressed up as art. Today, facing an even more restrictive climate in Indonesia, Suwage refuses to be silenced and has made those restrictions the focus of his art.

His latest exhibition, which opened at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute this month, highlights what he sees as a growing conservatism in majority Muslim but officially secular Indonesia. Many of the works probably could not be shown at a big public exhibition space in Indonesia following the passage of a controversial anti-pornography law last year.

“There are more important things to address in law than pornography, like education. But everyone wants to win a political point and on this issue the politics come easily,” Suwage told Reuters in an interview.

Suwage’s latest works are a series of prints of female nudes overlaid with the actual text of Indonesia’s 2008 anti-pornography law, under which a person can be charged for any public activity that “incites sexual desire.”

See the full feature here.

(Image: An Agus Suwage print “Behind the curtain” combining the text of Indonesia’s anti-pornography law with a female nude/Agus Suwage collection/Handout)

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A running crisis in relations between Silvio Berlusconi’s government and the Church deepened when Italy’s top Catholic weekly accused him of acting like a “prince” while many Italians were struggling financially.  A scathing editorial in Famiglia Cristiana, Italy’s largest circulation weekly news magazine, also indirectly criticised the media mogul’s private life and attacked the type of women politicians he has promoted in his centre-right party. And it did so without naming him once. The clever editorial in its online edition on September 16, here in Italian, was unsigned, meaning it was written by the magazine’s editor, Father Antonio Sciortino.

The editorial came several weeks after relations between the government and the influential Church nose-dived when a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family launched a personal attack against a top Catholic editor, forcing him to resign. Read our previous blogs on that episode here and here.

In the latest episode of a duel between the Church and the prime minister, the Famiglia Cristiana editorial made a number of clear references to Berlusconi and scandals or controversies that have surrounded him recently. In a laundry list of what it said were examples of the country’s moral degradation, it spoke of “escorts” and “high-class prostitutes.” Berlusconi has been at the centre of media attention in Italy and abroad over allegations that he spent a night with a call-girl in his Rome residence. The woman, Patrizia D’Addario, taped their private conversations and says she and other escorts were paid to attend his parties.

(Photo: Patrizia D’Addario in Otranto, 19 Aug, 2009/Fabio Serino)

Berlusconi has not denied sleeping with the woman but says he did not know she was an escort and says he has never paid for sex.

The Famiglia Cristiana editorial also spoke of women politicians and television personalities chosen “for their looks rather than intelligence.”

One of Berlusconi’s cabinet ministers is a former showgirl who has had a meteoric rise in politics. Berlusconi’s wife Veronica, who is seeking a divorce over his womanising, last April said his party’s selection of women candidates was a “shamelessly trashy” process aimed at keeping him “entertained.”

After listing its complaints, the editorial added sarcastically: “But everything is fine. The important thing is to spread optimism in spades and celebrate the triumphs of the Prince at L’Aquila, hiding the problems of a tough autumn for workers and families, who see themselves becoming always poorer.”

The reference to the “Prince at L’Aquila” was not lost on anyone. On Tuesday, critics accused Berlusconi of hogging the media spotlight during a programme on state television about the consignment of temporary homes to victims of the L’Aquila quake.

The opposition was furious after both state broadcaster RAI and Berlusconi’s Mediaset network abruptly postponed rival talk shows to give him more exposure.

(Photo: Berlusconi on RAI television, 15 Sept 2009/Remo Casilli)

The government’s relations with the influential Church have been icy in recent months in part because of Catholic media criticism of Berlusconi’s private life.

Earlier this month Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, launched front-page attacks on Dino Boffo, the editor of Avvenire newspaper of the Italian bishops conference, to retaliate for the editorials he wrote against Berlusconi. Il Giornale said the editor had a sexual scandal in his past. Boffo denied the charges but resigned after two weeks, saying he was innocent but was stepping down for the good of the Church.

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Muslims who commit adultery in Indonesia’s Aceh province may be stoned to death under a controversial new sharia law passed by the local parliament on Monday.  Aceh is the only province in predominantly Muslim Indonesia to use sharia for its legal code, introduced as part of an autonomy deal in 2002.

The “qanun jinayat”, or sharia law for crimes, covers adultery, consumption of alcohol, rape and homosexuality, according to the draft seen by Reuters. Adultery is punishable by stoning to death, while other punishments include caning, gold fines and imprisonment.

The new law could come into force as soon as next month. See the full story here.

(Photo: Baiturrahman Mosque in Banda Aceh, 15 April 2005/Tarmizy Harva)

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Call it a case of duelling headlines.

For the past few days, a highly personal and often below-the-sash battle has been waged in Italy between two newspapers — Il Giornale, owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and Avvenire, the daily of the Italian Bishops Conference.  The generals in the battle, which has riveted Italy and has resulted in one of the worst periods for years in relations between church and state here, are the editors-in-chief Vittorio Feltri of Il Giornale and Dino Boffo of Avvenire.

It all started on Friday, Aug. 28 when Il Giornale published a front-page, banner headline story purportedly revealing that that Boffo had accepted a plea bargain in court in 2002 after being accused of harrasing a woman. The paper said Boffo had a homosexual relationship with her husband. The headline read “The Super-Moralist Was Condemned for Molestation” (see image above). Feltri, one of Italy’s more unorthodox journalists, attacked Boffo because he had written a spate of editorials criticising Berlusconi over the prime minister’s private life. The fact that ultimately Berlusconi’s family is Feltri’s boss was not lost on Italian readers.

Another element in the background was the fact that Berlusconi has been under the spotlight for anything but government recently, including accusations of cavorting with teenagers and prostitutes. For the record, Berlusconi says there was nothing “spicy” in his relationship with an 18-year-old aspriring model and that even if  a call girl spent a night in his house, he never paid for sex in his life. What’s more, Berlusconi is also going through a messy divorce. His wife Veronica says she wanted out because she couldn’t take any more of his “lies”.

Hours after the first Il Giornale story came out, the Vatican announced that a long-planned dinner between Berlusconi and Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone had been cancelled. The dinner was to have taken place in L’Aquila during the annual “feast of forgiveness” in the city that was devastated by an earthquake last April. The official Vatican explanation was a nice try, but hard to swallow. It said the local bishop  had decided (five hours before the start of a dinner that had been planned for weeks) that the money would be better spent if donated to reconstruction efforts.

(Photo: Berlusconi on Italian television, sign says “And Veronica asks for a divorce,” 5 May 2009/Remo Casilli)

Boffo called the Il Giornale attack “journalistic assassination” and rejected the accusations “absurd”.  Here’s our story about the first day of the battle.

If this sounds like a soap opera, it is.  And like all good soap operas, it gets better.

Boffo did indeed have some judicial problems in 2002, but he says he was the victim not the perpetrator of “telephone harassment” and agreed to a plea bargain just to put it all behind him. Avvenire colleagues say he did indeed fly off the handle and have some kind of altercation with a woman in 2002, but it had nothing to do with him being homosexual. They say she had been pestering him by phone to hire her son.

The homosexual angle was found on a one-page report which Il Giornale implied was part of the police record. But Boffo’s defenders say that page was fabricated to look like an ammendment to a police report and sent anonymously years ago to Italian Catholic Church leaders, all of whom saw it as a smear campaign and binned it. The next day Il Giornale ran the following banner headline: “The Rage of the Unmasked Moralists”. And Tuesday it was “The Bishops Knew Everything For Some Time.”

Avvenire has been putting most of its responses to Il Giornale on its back pages and editorial pages, one calling the charges “a colossal worthless fake.” It has also run pages and pages of letters from readers in support of Boffo.

For days, the Vatican did not weigh in on the dispute even though it was blazing all around the walls of the city state. When it did on Tuesday, it got out the big guns, issuing a statement that Bertone — the number two man in the Vatican after Pope Benedict himself — had called Boffo and expressed his “closeness and solidarity.” This seemed to put aside rumours that Boffo might resign for the good of the Church.

For his part Berlusconi has kept a low profile. He issued a statement disassociating himself from the positions of his family newspaper on the first day, but has refused to make any further comments. “Everything I want to say, I have said already,” he declared on Tuesday, Sept 1.

(Photo: Berlusconi wipes face during conference in Milan, 30 July 2009/Alessandro Garofalo)

The fact remains that the whole episode – sometimes slow drip, sometimes percolating – has brought relations between the Italian Catholic Church and the Vatican on the one side and the Berlusconi government on the other side, to one of their worst levels, if not the worst. And the sometimes buffa soap opera continues. Tune in next time for the latest episode.

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By Niluksi Koswanage

Gay Austrian fashionista Bruno will not be making an appearance on Malaysia's screens this summer for fear of corrupting this mostly-Muslim nation's youth.

But Malaysia's parents will still not have it easy as the country's opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim  is again on trial for sodomy in a re-run of a 14-month case that in 1998 generated endless sexually explicit headlines and questions from curious children.

Photo: Anwar enters Kuala Lumpur courtoom with wife Wan Aziza Wasn Ismail for his sodomy trial on July 15/ Reuters (Zainal Abd Halim)

I was a teenager then when the former deputy prime minister was first found guilty of
sodomy and corruption in a marathon trial that featured graphic descriptions of anal
penetration, faithfully reported in lurid detail by this country's government-owned press and on prime-time TV.

(Photo: Anwar arrives in court on July 15, Reuters/

On my way to school, I saw angry protesters take to the streets and heard parents and teachers raging about children getting exposed to gay and straight sex (Anwar was accused of having an affair with a woman as well), accompanied by the kind of graphic descriptions usually reserved for specialist magazines.
 
A columnist in the normally staid government-run New Straits Times suggested at the time that all Malaysians should study a book to be entitled "An intelligent parent's guide to sodomy and other painful issues," based on the explicit testimony of Anwar's former driver who said he had been assaulted by Anwar and his adopted brother. Needless to say, he lost his column.
   
These were pre-YouTube days where sexual images were only available on illicit video recordings  and imported magazines. At the time, it was impossible to ignore the headlines as pro-government newspapers sought to tarnish Anwar's image.

One of the many ironies of the case was that Anwar, a pious Muslim, had been an education minister who had fervently opposed sex education in schools on moral grounds.  And blushing teachers often skipped or skimmed over the reproductive system in classes.

But with the trial, a generation of school kids were confronted with a court parade of x-rated items from a semen-stained mattress, medical reports on anal tearing to pubic hair samples.

Malay-language newspapers had to invent new words to decribe sex acts and body parts as Arabic loan words were inadequate to explain everything. Slang Bahasa Malaysia words like "pondan", a derogatory word for homosexual entered the formal lexicon via the courts and media.

The uncovering of Anwar's alleged sexual crimes in court and in the media was seen by many as a demonisation of a popular Malay politician in a leadership struggle during the Asian financial crisis that rocked Malaysia.

Despite the press palaver, there was no real crackdown on homosexuals during the trial, apart from the Muslim morality police occasionally raiding private gay parties in hotels. They still do that but you can more likely be arrested by the religious police for being in "khalwat" or "close proximity" to a person of the opposite sex.  

What 1998 did bring was protest. For the first time in a country that has now been ruled by the same political party for 51 years, many university students and young professionals took part in daily demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands.

It also gave birth to Malaysia's political alternative media that have grown into the main source of news in a country where the printed press is heavily controlled. Websites like Malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) got their first breath of life. A widely read Reformasi (reform) diary (a precursor to the blog), which detailed the movement started by Anwar, made its rounds in cyberspace and Malaysian gay websites saw their best business in years with chatrooms like GayMalaysia and SayangAbang (darling brother) filled with inquisitive onlookers. 
  
If there were long lines to get into the courthouse to witness the downfall of one of the country's best-known political figures, there were also long queues of straight patrons trying to get a feel of the drum and bass-thumping gay clubs like Liquid Room and the Blue Boy in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

The clubs, like Anwar, are still around today.
   
One young gay reporter even told Time Magazine his sex life had sizzled in 1998 as many people wanted to experiment, inspired by the trial.
   
Will the trial shock as much this time round or are Malaysians just too exposed to sex through MTV, YouTube and MySpace and numerous blogs?

More than 10 years on and two prime ministers later, Malaysia's conservatism appears to have grown deeper. Its rising political force is an Islamist party, one of Anwar's staunchest allies.

Will the new trial and publicity damage Anwar or the government? Finally released from imprisonment in 2004 and after a bar on holding office ended, the 61-year old was catapulted back into parliament in 2008 by-election with a huge majority, so it seems not.

A Roman Catholic nun who left her convent in India after 33 years of service has penned an unflattering picture of life within the cloistered walls in a book that may further embarrass the Church.

In “Amen: The Autobiography of a Nun”, published in India in English this month, Sister Jesme tells of sexual relations between some priests and nuns, homosexuality in the convent and discrimination and corruption in Catholic institutions…

“Amen” grabbed media headlines in February, when it was first published in Malayalam — the regional language of Kerala. With the new English edition and offers of a film based on the book, Sister Jesme’s plea for a reformation of the Church is now set to reach a wider audience.

Read our feature here.

DUBLIN - Victims of sexual abuse and neglect in Catholic-run schools and orphanages in Ireland swamped counseling services on Thursday after the publication of the harrowing findings of a nine-year investigation.

“We’ve had 30 times as many calls as usual and our phone lines are always quite busy,” said Bernadette Fahy of the Aislinn Center, an organization set up by an abuse victim. “We have had to close the center because we haven’t been able to cope with the amount of people coming in.

“It’s extraordinary the number of people who are contacting services for the first time.”

Read the follow-up story from our Dublin bureau here.

(Photo: John Kelly, who says he was abused between 1965 and 1967, reacts after being refused entry to the release of a government report into state abuse, in Dublin, 20 May 2009/Cathal McNaughton)

(Photo: Catholics attend pope’s Mass in Nazareth, 14 May 2009/Gil Cohen Magen)

After several days when the location of a speech sometimes clashed with the message he wanted to send, Pope Benedict must have been relieved to visit Nazareth today. The town where Jesus grew up lies in Israel proper, in the north of the country, and not in the political minefield of the West Bank that Benedict visited yesterday to see Bethlehem. In the town of the Holy Family, he was able to defend traditional Catholic family values without having to consider issues such as Palestinian statehood or apologies for the Holocaust. As he put it:

“All of us need… to return to Nazareth, to contemplate ever anew the silence and love of the Holy Family, the model of all Christian family life. Here, in the example of Mary, Joseph and Jesus, we come to appreciate even more fully the sacredness of the family, which in God’s plan is based on the lifelong fidelity of a man and a woman consecrated by the marriage covenant and accepting of God’s gift of new life. How much the men and women of our time need to reappropriate this fundamental truth, which stands at the foundation of society, and how important is the witness of married couples for the formation of sound consciences and the building of a civilization of love!”

Of course, this is just as political as the other questions he’s dealt with on this visit, as the growing acceptance of gay marriage at the state level in the United States shows, but it’s on a different level. The issue isn’t the same in Israel, because the the Chief Rabbinate oversees marriages here and rules out gay marriage. The same goes for civil unions. But colleagues in our Jerusalem bureau tell me that times are changing here as well. Israeli social services now often recognise a long-standing gay relationship as similar to common law marriage and extend benefits to same-sex partners.