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The crux case centres on a woman called Nishal, a 26-year-old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat the hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats.

So Nishal went to the courts to request an early divorce, hoping that once they were no longer married he would leave her alone. A judge who believed in the rights of women would find it very easy to make a judgement: you're free from this man, case dismissed.

#3 Hofstra University gang-rape case

An 18-year-old Hofstra University freshman accused five men, including another Hofstra student, of gang-raping her after a campus party in Hempstead, N.Y., in September 2009.

Four of the men were charged and a fifth was about to be arrested after the woman told police she was lured to a dormitory after a dance party. She said she was bound with rope while the five men took turns sexually assaulting her in a stall in the men's bathroom.

Then a grainy and explicit cellphone video of the incident emerged, showing the sex was consensual. The woman recanted her story after the prosecutor asked her: “If there is a video, and I get that video, it's going to show me that what you're saying is true?”

"Our unofficial Facebook policy is not to automatically delete comments that disagree with us, but when the comments come into untruths or uncharitable, then we have to delete them," Poust said. "And when it really becomes abusive we have to ban them."

According to the group, one Facebook post stated: "Eventually your kind of 'religion' will be extinguished from the memory of mankind forever, because this sort of interference in the lives of people you only wish to harm. You have NO MORAL AUTHORITY any longer because of your evil pedophilia."

Another said the Catholic church only approves of marriages "that produce altar boys to be molested."

The group deleted both.

Judge Ware’s decision was swift. Within 24 hours, he issued his ruling against opponents of same-sex marriage. The editorial in the Sacramento Bee lauded the verdict:

“The sole fact that a federal judge shares the same circumstances or personal characteristics with other members of the general public, and that the judge could be affected by the outcome of a proceeding in the same way that other members of the general public would be affected, is not a basis for either recusal or disqualification,” Ware wrote.

Federal judges can be disqualified from a case if they have a financial interest in the outcome, a close friendship with litigants, or a strong personal bias. Ware forcefully reinforced that a judge’s race, gender, religious affiliation and, yes, sexual orientation isn’t enough by itself.

The Prop. 8 proponents insisted that they weren’t saying that Walker, who was randomly selected to hear the case, should have been disqualified just because he was gay. The issue, they said, was that he was in “the exact same shoes” as the gay and lesbian couples who brought the lawsuit to overturn Prop. 8 and could personally benefit from his own decision.

But by their logic, female judges could be challenged from presiding over sexual harassment, abortion or equal pay cases. As Ware asked, would black judges like himself be barred from civil rights cases? Would reverse discrimination cases be off limits to white male judges? Would heterosexual ones be forbidden from taking on gay rights cases? Where would you draw the line?

– Sacramento Bee, 15 June 2011, Editorial. Link.

Should a gay male teacher be barred from teaching sexuality education?

If you say he should not teach because professionalism and impartiality is critical to the job, then the next question will obviously be: Why is a gay male teacher not considered professional or incapable of impartiality?

If you say that partiality is the essence of the job, i.e. the purpose of sexuality education is to “promote” heterosexuality and reinforce prejudice against other sexualities, that sexuality education is a form of catechism rather than education (i.e. inculcating knowledge, questioning, self-awareness and responsibility) then the question is: Why is sexuality “education” supposed to be catechism?

this seemingly far-fetched interpretation of a “circumstance of the case” to be regarded by the court in determining maintenance does bring up a very liquid point which the law has up till now found awkward at best in addressing. In the case of ancillary matters, how do you put a monetary value – positive or negative – on such subjective entities as beauty, sex appeal, or charm? And what about honour, trust and love? Should the factors leading to the breakdown in marriage also be quantified, such as boredom, frigidity, selfishness, or hate?

Should this be the way courts in future consider the issue of maintenance?

The reduction of gay equality to a matter of economic benefit troubled me. Even worse were references to the Pink Dollar, with the unstated characterisation of gay people as better off than average (Where’s the evidence? I asked) and mindlessly consumerist.

I am uncomfortable with too much focus on the health benefits of repeal. Firstly, the benefits can be limited because there are plenty of other factors that impact on the effectiveness of health services, and secondly, it misses the point. People who favour anti-gay legislation do so not because they primarily want to damage the health of gay people. There are a whole host of other reasons that still need addressing.

However difficult, we cannot shirk from the most fundamental reason for repeal of Section 377A and gay equality in general: Equality is a human right, and to impair equality for one group today would undermine the claim to equality for all other groups tomorrow.

She set about trying to find the childhood "wounds" that she believes led to my homosexuality. But she found none. "There was no sexual abuse?" she pressed.

"No."

"I think there is something there . . . you've allowed things to be done to you." She then prayed: "Father, we give you permission to bring to the surface some of the things that have happened over the years." I asked who could have committed this abuse – a member of my family? "Yes, very likely," she replied.

Both sex-related cases with victims who were underage, but there are differences. Let’s compare the two cases:

Singapore’s yearly budget was released on Friday, so Saturday’s newspaper had a special supplement, which included articles “Building an inclusive society”, “Towards a first-rate developed society” and “$365m a year for the arts”.

All great stuff, but I found it in marked contrast to this article last Tuesday: “Only one print for Kids”

The “key speech arguing for the retention of 377A” that Hor refers to was that made by Thio.

Hor then goes on to discover that the government’s decision was bi-layered. The surface justification, going by the prime minister’s words, was that it would be symbolic — a “signpost of heterosexual orthodoxy”.

Hor next asks what the motivation might be for wanting such a symbol. He examines the possibility that it could be to steer people towards heterosexual orientation, yet the government itself, from its own words, does not believe so.