In Italy on Wednesday, the Italian Senate pushed forward the West’s most restrictive ban on international surrogacy, making it a crime punishable by prison time for Italians to use surrogates in another country. The move closes the door on same-sex couples’ last, best option to start a family in the country.
The far-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had already banned both surrogacy and domestic or international adoption by same-sex couples in Italy.
The legislation amending existing Italian law would classify surrogacy as a universal crime transcending borders and impose a two-year prison sentence and a million-euro fine for defying it. The law also criminalizes work by Italian doctors, nurses and technicians in foreign fertility clinics that provide surrogacy services.
Last year, Meloni’s government barred Italian cities and towns from accepting birth certificates that list same-sex parents, denying their children access to citizenship, public schooling and healthcare. That edict is tied up in court.
The Senate’s passage of the anti-surrogacy law, 84 to 58, follows approval by the government’s lower house last year, virtually assuring its enactment.
Meloni has made “traditional values” a cornerstone of her tenure leading the Brothers of Italy party, despite being a single mother who never married. The far-right populist league was founded on the ruins of Benito Mussolini’s Republican Fascist Party in the aftermath of World War II.
“It’s like a truck hitting us in the face,” Pierre Molena, a gay man pursuing surrogacy abroad with his partner, told The New York Times.
“We are worried about our future and that of our children,” he said.
“It is nature that decides this, not us,” Sen. Susanna Campione, who voted in favor of the law, told the The Washington Post.
“This is a civilized law that safeguards the child but also the woman, since we believe that surrogacy essentially reduces a woman to a reproductive machine.”
While most U.S. states and Canada allow the practice, surrogacy has become a flashpoint in Europe. Germany and France ban domestic surrogacy, while it’s legal in the United Kingdom and Greece under certain circumstances. Pope Francis has labeled the practice “womb renting,” and called for a global ban.
About 250 couples a year in Italy pursue international surrogacy, according to legal experts. Ten percent of those couples are same-sex.
“This law is disgusting,” Salvatore Scarpa told the The Post. The gay dad and his partner had a daughter with a surrogate based in California last year and plan to have a second child with the same woman. They have an implantation planned for this month.
“They cannot stop our family. How dare they judge us,” he said.
Alessandra Maiorino, a member of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, said the new law stigmatizes children already born to gay couples as well, telling lawmakers who voted for it: “It looks like you don’t realize these people already exist.”
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The NSW equality bill brings the state into line with others. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP
Rights and protections for LGBTQ+ people in New South Wales have been strengthened with the passing of a bill in the state parliament late on Thursday, after the legislation was watered down to gain Labor support.
The equality bill will give transgender people the ability to have their sex changed on their birth certificates without undergoing invasive surgery, bringing the state in line with others, and non-binary will become a gender option for birth certificates.
There were cheers in the chamber when the bill passed about 8.40pm. The independent MP Alex Greenwich, who introduced the package a year ago, embraced the leader of the government in the upper house, Penny Sharpe after the vote that succeeded without the opposition’s support.
Greenwich said the changes would “improve LGBTIQA+ dignity, safety and equality” and thanked Sharpe for her work getting the legislation through the upper house.
“We’ve got more work to do and we start that work now with new confidence from these significant wins for our community,” he said on Thursday night.
After months of stagnation, Greenwich convinced the premier, Chris Minns, to support the bill by making a number of major concessions, including dropping changes to the anti-discrimination act.
While advocates welcomed the remaining elements of the bill, many also raised concerns that protections for LGBTQ+ teachers and students at private schools had been dumped.
The Equality Australia chief executive, Anna Brown, thanked community members who shared their stories and all those who campaigned to garner support for the changes.
“These new laws will have no impact on the lives of most people in our state, but for a small number of people it will make their lives immeasurably better,” she said after the bill passed.
“It’s a journey that continues as we turn our attention to the state’s anti-discrimination laws and our ongoing efforts to protect vulnerable teachers and students in religious and private schools across the state.”
Greenwich had hoped the Coalition would allow MPs a conscience vote on the bill but earlier in the week the opposition leader, Mark Speakman, confirmed his party would stand against the reforms.
Despite that, the Liberal MP for the North Shore, Felicity Wilson, crossed the floor.
“Just because your party doesn’t have a conscience vote doesn’t mean you don’t have a conscience,” she told ABC Radio Sydney earlier in the week.
Greenwich said on Wednesday that the Coalition was moving further to the right and “using my community as a political football, as a political punching bag”.
“I am concerned that we are seeing a rightwing trend developing within the Coalition,” he said. “No other leader has denied their members a conscience vote on LBGT issues.”
The opposition attorney general, Alister Henskens, held a news conference with religious figures and community members opposed to the reforms earlier in the week.
Among the concerns he raised was about the “impact upon the privacy of women’s spaces”.
“It’s moving too far and it’s moving too quickly,” he said.
But the attorney general, Michael Daley, said the opposition was misrepresenting the package.
The bill also repealed offences for living off the earnings of a sex worker and made threatening to “out” a person’s LGBTIQA+ status an offence.
A broken window on an LGBTQ fashion boutique storefront in Manhattan, New York on June 12, 2023.Photo: Shutterstock
There has been a 112% increase in documented attacks on LGBTQ+ people nationwide, according to a newly unveiled Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker (ALERT) from the queer media watchdog organization GLAAD. GLAAD hopes to use the tracker to provide comprehensive reporting and analysis detailing anti-LGBTQ+ hate in the U.S. and the specific communities and targets affected by it.
ALERT recorded 524 such incidents between June 2022 and 2023 and 1,109 incidents from June 2023 to 2024. These attacks have included over 450 protests, 330 propaganda drops, 320 acts of vandalism, 200 bomb & mass shooting threats, 130 assaults, and 45 cases of arson that have resulted in at least 161 injuries and 21 deaths, GLAAD’s ALERT Desk reported.
While the cases focus on drag bans and trans protections, they address larger issues of free speech and civil rights.
The attacks have also included over 567 attacks on transgender and gender non-conforming people, 360 incidents targeting educational institutions and libraries, 325 incidents targeting Pride flags and other LGBTQ+ community symbols, 160 protests and violent threats against drag performers, and 140 incidents targeting health care providers of gender-affirming care and their patients.
The tracker, which will be updated quarterly, includes data on criminal and non-criminal acts of hate from sources like news media, partner organizations (like the Human Rights Campaign or Anti-Defamtion League’s Center on Extremism), right-wing forums on social media sites like Gab or chat apps like Telegram as well as incident reports submitted via GLAAD’s website. All documented incidents must occur against groups or individuals within the U.S. and must include harassment, threats, or actual violence specifically targeting LGBTQ+ people.
GLAAD’s ALERT team will verify the validity of each incident to maintain credibility, remove duplicates, and exclude spam and trolling, the organization said.
“The ALERT Desk tells a story not entirely captured by the FBI’s hate crime statistics because many of these incidents, like protests at Pride events, don’t meet the criteria necessary to bring legal charges [and] aren’t included in most official hate crime counts,” GLAAD wrote in its recently released report on ALERT’s findings. “However, we must recognize that the impact of these acts on local LGBTQ communities is felt regardless of whether or not the incident is prosecuted.”
“We must recognize that the impact of these acts on local LGBTQ communities is felt regardless of whether or not the incident is prosecuted.”
GLAAD’s 2024 report on ALERT’s findings
During a press call, Barbara Simon, senior director of news and campaigns at GLAAD, noted that ALERT seeks to contextualize anti-LGBTQ+ incidents to help media and other experts understand larger systems of violence.
“[Recently], there was a bomb threat against a library in Massachusetts,” Simon said, a threat against a Drag Queen Story Hour at the public library in Somerville. “But it’s not just about that library. It’s not just about the inclusive materials and programs they had, about how the bomb squad had to come in and sweep the library, how children and families and patrons had to evacuate the library.”
“Our data shows how that incident is connected to the bigger picture, which is more of a broad-based, systemic attack against LGBTQ people, our visibility, our equality and our allies,” Simon added. “It is one of 365 attacks nationwide against drag artisan events. It’s one of 63 anti-LGBTQ attacks in Massachusetts alone, one of 15 attacks specifically against drag in Massachusetts.”
The quarterly reports will also include stories from those affected by the incidents.
GLAADA bar graph showing anti-LGBTQ+ hate incidents from GLAAD’s ALERT Desk. | GLAAD
For example, Dr. Jack Turban, pediatric psychiatrist and director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California in San Francisco, said during the press call that bans on gender-affirming care for youth in 26 states have worsened the mental health of his young trans patients even though they live in a state where such health care is protected. Their mental health has been worsened, Turban said, because of an increase in anti-trans rhetoric nationwide whose indirect effects cross state lines.
“Kids are hearing things like being trans is a mental illness, or being trans is bad, or you shouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom that aligns with your gender identity because trans people are sexual assaulters, or you shouldn’t be allowed to play on sports teams with your friends because you’re going to physically hurt them,” Turban said. “My patients know that none of those things are true, right? They can know that, but if you’re hearing it every single day, all over social media and all over the news and now right in their communities, even it’s impossible to not be impacted by that.”
GLAAD pointed out that media coverage tends to falsely frame medical care for transgender people as a “debate” despite every major medical association supporting the care. This coverage compounds the effect of hateful rhetoric from anti-trans politicians, protestors, and pundits.
ShutterstockSalina EsTitties attends the 35th Annual GLAAD Awards on March 14, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. | Shutterstock
The hateful rhetoric affects even LGBTQ+ celebrities and their fans, like Salina EsTitties, a competitor who appeared in Season 15 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. EsTitties told the press call that she’s generally insulated from hatred against gender non-conforming people since she lives in the very gay city of West Hollywood, California. However, she sees its impact whenever she travels to other states or posts social media videos about LGBTQ+ issues.
“There’s comments every single day of people being like, ‘This is not what God created. God created two genders. Oh, they keep adding alphabets. Oh, just shoot it between the eyes and get rid of it,’” EsTitties said. “The online hate is insane and there’s so much of it, and people are so willing to just let it all out, but it’s a clear representation of how people actually feel in America and across, you know, the U.S. here.”
“Not only are our LGBT community dealing with having to be their authentic selves,” she continued. “Being their authentic selves with just who they are outside of their queer identity is a lot to navigate, and it’s not easy, especially when people are telling you, ‘You’re the Devil, you’re a demon,’ or ‘It’s not acceptable to be that.’”
Hate crimes typically increase during presidential election years. Marie Cottrell, executive director for the New Jersey-based LGBTQ+ advocacy center Out Montclair, said she hopes that increased awareness of anti-LGBTQ+ hate incidents will empower communities to build intersectional coalitions between other demographic groups whose members are targeted by similar hate.
“I think that it’s really important that you be the person that the community needs,” Cottrell told the press call. “They need to see you stand for and with them. Find folks who in your community who will stand with you in the face of intolerance, build a community of support within your township — whether that’s forging a relationship with your LGBTQ liaison within the local police department … working with the township, the mayor, the town council, and really having open conversations … having conversations that address really hard questions and topics and that starts the process of understanding and healing in your community.”
“It’s a small step, but it’s a step forward and a step forward in helping others understand the community,” she said.
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(I don’t know if this is gonna work; I’m not on Instagram, but I went there, and could see, hear, read, and got the embed link. MomsRising is asking for shares, so if anyone cares to share, thank you!)
November 2, 1920 Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs received nearly one million votes for President though he was serving a prison sentence at the time for his criticism of World War I and his encouraging resistance to the draft. More on Debs
November 2, 1982 Voters in nine general elections passed statewide referenda supporting a freeze on testing of nuclear weapons. Only Arizona turned it down. Dr. Randall Forsberg, a key person behind the Freeze movement Dr. Randall Forsberg
November 2, 1983 A bill designating a federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (to be observed on the third Monday of January) was signed by President Ronald Reagan. King was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience of the laws that enforced racial segregation. The history of Martin Luther King Day (pdf)
Two Ballot boxes damaged overnight with incendiary devices in SE Portland at 11th and Belmont AND Fishers Landing Vancouver, WA. It’s not known at this time if any ballots were damaged.
Below is what the tRump campaign is all about, toxic masculinity. Gang thug 12 yr old boys on the playground standing around insulting other kids pretending to be tough guys. Is this what you want for president, for congress? People who feel that everyone different from them should be insulted and belittled? Hugs
NFL rules forbid political “messages or gestures” during games or on the field. Just ask Colin Kaepernick, who was attacked by Bosa for kneeling during the anthem. The cult is celebrating Bosa and attacking NBC for editing the incident out of their coverage.
8.2 billion people and he is desperate for more … white ones. Yes that is the truth of it. First he is so egotistical he thinks his genetics are superior to any others. Second the fear he has is that brown people will out number white ones and rule the world. As a member of South Africa’s apartheid system he hates the idea of whites not being firmly and securely ruling over everyone else. He is a sick man. Hugs
They are so sure the voter purges are hurting the democrats that they push deeper and deeper cuts to the voter rolls. Not realizing they are hitting their own people now also. Hugs
And she seethed at the idea that anyone would question the citizenship of a former federal employee with the “whitest name you could have.”
The elections office in Montgomery County, just north of Houston, had sent Howard-Elley a letter in late January saying that she had been flagged after she indicated that she was not a U.S. citizen in response to a jury summons. She had 30 days to provide the county proof of citizenship or she would be removed from the voter rolls, according to the letter.
More than 75,000 spectators gathered in Washington, D.C., to hear Vice President Kamala Harris‘ closing argument speech at the same site of former President Donald Trump‘s infamous “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Harris’ event at the Ellipse arrived one week before Election Day and followed Trump’s closing arguments at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that received backlash for its inflammatory and racist rhetoric.
As the vice president took the stage Tuesday night, her campaign’s rapid response director, Ammar Moussa, posted to his account on X, formerly Twitter, that there were “OVER 75,000 people on the National Mall to watch Kamala Harris deliver her closing remarks.”
“Here. We. Go,” Moussa added.
CNN later reported that the Ellipse was at capacity and some guests were directed to an overflow area on the National Mall, per a Harris campaign official.
Democratic presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Ellipse just south of the White House in Washington, D.C., on October 29. The Harris campaign said that more than 75,000 people gathered to… More BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump held his January 6, 2021, rally at the Ellipse on the same day a mob of his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol while Congress was certifying the 2020 election in which Trump lost to President Joe Biden. According to the House Select Committee tasked with investigating January 6, around 53,000 people attended Trump’s speech before the attack.
Harris’ previous crowd size record was set on Friday at her rally in Houston, which included an appearance from Beyoncé. The vice president’s campaign said around 30,000 people showed up to the Shell Energy Stadium event, which was focused on reproductive rights.
Trump frequently touts his own rally sizes, although as Newsweek has reported, the former president often exaggerates his crowd numbers. Trump’s campaign said that the former president’s event in New York City on Sunday filled Madison Square Garden to capacity. The venue can fit a maximum of 19,500 people.
Sunday’s event was marred by racist remarks hurled about Latinos, Black people, Jews and Palestinians. Sexist comments were also made about Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by several speakers.
Trump’s campaign has spoken out against one comment, made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who said during his speech that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” The former president’s team said that the “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott when asked about the joke on Tuesday, “I don’t know him. Someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.”
The former president also failed to condemn other statements made at Madison Square Garden during a speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, saying instead, “There’s never been an event so beautiful.”
“The love in that room was breathtaking,” he added. “It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honor to be involved.”
Harris said during her Ellipse speech that Trump “has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other.”
“That is who he is,” she added. “But America, I am here tonight to say that is not who we are.”
The vice president also criticized Trump’s comments about going after the “enemy from within” if elected to the White House. Despite receiving immense pushback for the comments in recent weeks, Trump repeated the phrase during his Madison Square Garden speech, telling supporters, “We’re running against a massive, crooked, malicious leftist machine that’s running the Democrat Party. They are smart and vicious, they are the enemy within, we must defeat them.”
On Tuesday, Harris told supporters, “Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls …’the enemy from within.'”
Harris added, “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email Tuesday for comment.
and reblogging this one from Keith. I hate giving the Don any time at all, but the bottom line of this is that the young people are seeing this, some for the first time, as they were in middle and high school in 2016.
November 1, 1872 Susan B. Anthony and her three sisters entered a voter registration office set up in a barbershop. They were part of a group of fifty women Anthony had organized to register in her home town of Rochester. Anthony walked directly to the election inspectors and, as one of the inspectors would later testify, “demanded that we register them as voters.” The election inspectors refused, but she persisted, quoting the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship provision and the article from the New York Constitution pertaining to voting, which contained no sex qualification. She persisted: “If you refuse us our rights as citizens, I will bring charges against you in Criminal Court and I will sue each of you personally for large, exemplary damages!” The inspectors sought the advice of the Supervisor of elections: “Young men,” he said, “do you know the penalty of law if you refuse to register these names?” Registering the women, the registrars were advised, “would put the entire onus of the affair on them.” The inspectors voted to allow Anthony and her three sisters to register. In all, fourteen Rochester women successfully registered that day. But the Rochester Union and Advertiser editorialized: “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon . . . if these women in the Eighth Ward offer to vote, they should be challenged, and if they take the oaths and the Inspectors receive and deposit their ballots, they should all be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
November 1, 1929 Australia abolished peace-time compulsory military training.
November 1, 1954 A war of independence to end French colonial rule over the north African nation of Algeria began when 60 bombs were set off on this day in Algiers, the capital. Over the next eight years 1.5 million Algerians would die, along with about 30,000 French. The French had dominated the country since 1830. French troops clash with Algerian civilians Read more
November 1, 1954 The U.S. produced the biggest ever man-made explosion in the Pacific archipelago of Bikini, part of the Marshall Islands. The hydrogen bomb, equivalent of 20 million tons of TNT was up to 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It overwhelmed the measuring instruments, indicating that the bomb was much more powerful than scientists had anticipated. One of the atolls was totally vaporized, disappearing into a gigantic mushroom cloud that spread at least 100 miles wide, dropping back to the sea in the form of radioactive fallout.
November 1, 1961 50,000-100,000 women joined protests against the resumption of atmospheric nuclear tests by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The demonstrations, in at least 60 U.S. cities, led to the founding of Women Strike for Peace. Their slogan: “End the Arms Race – Not the Human Race.” See Photos from Swarthmore College Peace Collection “Women’s Strike for Peace” storming the Pentagon in a 1967 protest against the war in Vietnam. Bella Abzug demonstrating with WSP photo: Dorothy Marder
November 1, 1970 Detroit’s Common Council voted for immediate withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Vietnam.
November 1, 1983 A senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz about intelligence reports that showed Iraqi troops resorting to “almost daily use of CW [chemical weapons]” against the Iranians. Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran in 1980. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president’s recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
November 1, 1990 As part of the adoption of the International Law of the Sea, forty-three nations agreed to ban dumping industrial wastes at sea by 1995. Neither the U.S. nor Canada (along with Albania, Burundi, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan and San Marino) have ever ratified the treaty which thus lacks the force of U.S. federal law. More on the Law of the Sea
November 1, 2003 The Tel Aviv memorial for Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin, slain eight years previously, was transformed into a peace rally with over 100,000 protesting the military policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.”Yitzhak was right, and his path just,” said Shimon Peres, the former prime minister and architect of the Oslo peace accords with Mr Rabin. “His views today are clear and enduring. There will be no retreat; we will continue.” Read more
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni
A broken window on an LGBTQ fashion boutique storefront in Manhattan, New York on June 12, 2023.Photo: Shutterstock
