Gay Rights

Prospects for passage of the governor's gay rights bill all but vanished yesterday as a Maryland Senate committee voted to add amendments gutting the measure.The legislation, designed to prohibit discrimination against Maryland's gay men and lesbians, won approval in the House of Delegates but ran into serious trouble in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee.Committee members attached four weakening amendments to the bill yesterday, including one that advocates say would prevent it from being an effective tool against discrimination.

If a landlord evicts two men because they are homosexual, the couple has no legal recourse in Maryland. And if a lesbian loses a job because of her sexual orientation, she is equally out of luck.A group of ministers, gay rights advocates and others urged a House committee in Annapolis to help change that yesterday by approving legislation that would outlaw housing and job discrimination because of sexual orientation.The proposal, which is supported by Gov. Parris N. Glendening, would give homosexuals and bisexuals the right to file a complaint with the state government to keep their jobs and homes.

WASHINGTON -- Saving some of the hardest cases for last, the Supreme Court winds up its hearings for the term this week by returning to the nation's culture wars over abortion and gay rights. In two cases with far-reaching social and political implications, the justices on Tuesday will take up their first major abortion case in eight years, and on Wednesday they will review a New Jersey case involving the Boy Scouts' ban on homosexual members and leaders. The abortion case, centering on a Nebraska law that both sides refer to as a "partial-birth" abortion ban, is shaping up as a test of whether the court will cut back on the right to abortion declared by the court in 1973 and kept largely intact in a 1992 decision.

JERUSALEM -- As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict boiled over this week, it competed for headlines here with a pivotal clash in Israel's culture war between secular and Orthodox Jewish values. The inflammatory issue: gay rights in the Holy Land. For days, Israeli television viewers were treated to surreal images of ultra-Orthodox Jews pelting the police with stones and setting cars afire in a campaign against a planned gay pride march through Jerusalem. The battle ended yesterday in a setback for Israel's gay community, which bowed to pressure to take the annual event off the streets and confine it to a stadium.

As the General Assembly enters its final three weeks, legislators are still wrestling with three of the session's most contentious issues: the death penalty, gay rights and public aid to private schools. And looming over almost everything else is the governor's proposed budget -- a spending plan that Democrats and Republicans fear may be too optimistic in a slowing economy, even as they criticize it for providing too little money for health care for the poor. Dozens of other issues, big and small, will be debated in the frenzied days before the session's end April 9, including helping the elderly with the high cost of prescription drugs and extending collective bargaining rights to university employees.

WASHINGTON -- Pamela Smart, the high school instructor who used sex to entice a teen-age student to murder her husband and then became the subject of a steamy drama on television, failed to get the Supreme Court interested in her case yesterday.The court also turned aside the first "gay rights" case to reach it in its new term, an unsuccessful appeal by a former Central Intelligence Agency employee who hid his homosexuality from his superiors for years and was fired when they found out.In the Pamela Smart case, the court turned down the constitutional challenges she had raised to her conviction and life-without-parole sentence.

Legislation that would add gays and lesbians to the ranks of groups protected from discrimination in Maryland cleared a major hurdle last night, narrowly gaining the approval of a House committee in Annapolis.The decision casts aside six years of defeat in the House Judiciary Committee, marking a major victory for gay rights advocates. The 12-8 vote also stands as an accomplishment for Gov. Parris N. Glendening, who has been waging an aggressive campaign for the bill."I applaud the members of the House Judiciary Committee who courageously said today that discrimination has no place in Maryland," Glendening said in a statement released after the vote.

WASHINGTON - The often successful drive to legalize marijuana as a medicine and the seldom victorious effort to allow doctor-assisted suicide will be back on the ballot in some states next week amid an outpouring of voter issues. Citizens with gripes or policy ideas that state legislatures won't pursue will have the chance on Tuesday to test the popularity of their causes as more than 200 proposals go before the voters in 42 states. Once again, says the Initiative and Referendum Institute, a Washington-based group that tracks citizen actions, voters will face "politically diverse, emotional and very controversial issues."

DENVER -- A challenge to the constitutionality of a Colorado measure forbidding legal protection for homosexuals begins today in a state district court here.The measure, which put this state at the center of a national debate over gay rights laws, has never been put into effect. Denver District Judge Jeffrey Bayless, who issued an injunction in January preventing the law's enforcement, will preside over the trial.In ordering the injunction, Judge Bayless said: "There is a fundamental right here, and it is the right not to have the state endorse and give effect to private biases."

When Gov. Parris N. Glendening signs a landmark gay rights bill into law today, the occasion will be exciting yet bittersweet for one Montgomery County legislator. Del. Sheila E. Hixson has been introducing essentially the same anti-discrimination bill every year since 1993, and the ceremony will mark one of the most significant milestones in her 25-year legislative career. But missing from the crowd celebrating the end of her long struggle will be her son, Richard Hixson, a gay man who died in December at the age of 40. He lived long enough to see his mother win House approval of the bill in 1999, but wasn't there for the Senate breakthrough that led to the success of her cause.