Religion is treated very differently in the UK than in the states, thankfully. Here in England ostentatious display of religious fervour in public will make onlookers do small circular motions at the temples. It’s not something you do, okay? Religion is private.

That doesn’t stop certain Christians of course, and one couple that was banned from fostering because they couldn’t promise to be neutral about homosexuality to the kids that Derby local council wanted to place with them has decided to try to get a court to lift the ban.

A Christian couple who say they have been barred from fostering because of their “traditional” views on homosexuality are to take their case to the High Court.

Eunice and Owen Johns said their local council’s fostering panel rejected them as carers because they could not tell a child a homosexual lifestyle was acceptable.

This is terrible, says the Christians in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph. Not being allowed to say that “gay people are wicked sinners that must burn in hell!” to the kids that the social services place in their care amounts to coercion and persecution.

The bishops claim that the case, which is expected to begin at the High Court this week, will determine whether Christians can continue to be express their beliefs in this country.

They fear that the ruling has the potential to exclude people of faith from adopting or fostering children and enshrine the discrimination of those with traditional Biblical views.

I’m a bit baffled by the logic of the argument which seems to be that Christians feel persecuted and discriminated against because they’re not allowed to persecute and discriminate against gay people. How about a deal, Christians? You shut up about us and we’ll shut up about you? Okay?

Didn’t think so, which is why it’s nice to see indications that US troops have a markedly more sober attitude about the whole thing. According to leaks about the survey among the troops, the majority don’t seem to mind fighting along LGBT soldiers.

A majority of active-duty and reserve service members surveyed by the Defense Department would not object to serving and living alongside openly gay troops, according to multiple people familiar with the findings.

The survey’s results are expected to be included in a Pentagon report, due to President Obama on Dec. 1, regarding how the military would end enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that bans openly gay men and lesbians from serving in uniform.

Which is good and proper, of course, if only the current administration hadn’t enraged the LGBT community Over There by actually going into court to fight for a policy they view as bad. A policy stance that the White House shares with Hollywood in general, because it seems the moviemakers can’t get it right, despite the rhetoric.

I’m of course talking about the dilemma that Ron Howard’s movie “The Dilemma” has got itself into. In the movie there’s a joke that has enraged the queers in the US. The character disparages electric cars as being “gay”, ie bad.

Despite being pulled from the movie’s trailer after a whirlwind of controversy, an “electric cars are gay” joke will remain in “The Dilemna” for the film’s upcoming theatrical release, director Ron Howard told the Los Angeles Times.

Now it remains if the gay opens their wallets to pay for admission. It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

These last few weeks have been a tumultuous time for the LGBT community with all those dead kids over in the States. For a while it seemed like there wasn’t a day without a report on another young life ended by persecution and harassment.

Justin Aaberg, Seth Walsh, Billie Lucas, Asher Brown, Tyler Clementi, Zach Harrington and Corey Jackson are just a few of the names in the list who saw no other chance for relief than to end their own lives.

But the list is a bitter one because LGBT youth have sought the penultimate relief for years before this, and will most like continue to choose death at a much higher rate than straight teens.

Suicide (i.e., taking one’s own life) is a serious public health problem that affects even young people. For youth between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death. It results in approximately 4500 lives lost each year. The top three methods used in suicides of young people include firearm (46%), suffocation (39%), and poisoning (8%).

That number puts things in perspective and shows that in the United States twelve youth per day choose to end their lives, and a fair portion of those are LGBT youth. In a study in 2009 a CDC survey estimated that 19.9% of youth were bullied in American high schools, grades 9 to 12.

A survey by the organisation GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) showed the levels of homophobic bullying in US schools for LGBT youth.

The 2009 survey of 7,261 middle and high school students found that at school nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment at school in the past year and nearly two-thirds felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation. Nearly a third of LGBT students skipped at least one day of school in the past month because of safety concerns.

Now, here in England we might adopt an air of condescension about that, but we certainly don’t have it better.

There are no identifiable statistics for youth per se that I can find, but in 2008 there were 3006 suicides in the age band 15-44 years old, according to the Office of National Statistics. This does not include younger teens or children.

In the early 1990s the highest suicide rates in the UK were among men aged 75 years and over. Rates in this age group have since decreased from 25.1 per 100,000 in 1991 to 14.0 per 100,000 in 2008, now the lowest rate across the three male age bands. Since 1997, the highest rates have been in men aged 15-44, peaking in 1998 at 24.0 per 100,000 and then steadily decreasing. In 2008, the rate for this age group increased to 18.6 per 100,000 from 17.6 per 100,000 in 2007. Suicide rates among men aged 45-74 have fluctuated less throughout the period and increased from 16.0 in 2007 to 17.0 per 100,000 in 2008.

A fair number of these would be LGBT persons due to the pressures that British school children face, and in particular LGBT children and youth. Homophobic bullying is endemic in our schools as well.

In Stonewall’s School Report the charity also gives more solid numbers about the levels of homophobic bullying in UK schools.

Sixty-five percent of the LGBT kids reports that they’ve experienced bullying first hand, and that homophobic slurs are near universal. Ninety eight percent report hearing negative attitudes toward gays in their school environment.

So, we may have better laws in the UK, but our children and our youth face the same relentless persecution as the kids in America, with the difference that our dead and bullied kids aren’t news. They still die, and they still suffer, but their misery is still swept under the rug.

Trying to figure out why things are as they are is both easy and hard. It is easy to say that the reason LGBT youth commit suicide at a higher rate than others is the homophobic environment they live in. But it is harder to explain why there is such a homophobic environment in this day and age.

Zach Harrington’s death can serve as an illustration, as his suicide is a bit of an anomaly in the crop that’s been. So let’s go back to the States, to young Zach’s death.

Zach killed himself after attending a City Council meeting in Norman City, Oklahoma. A week after the meeting he hanged himself. Why did he do this? We can never know for certain since he is no longer with us to explain his actions, but according to his father the City council meeting was one of the causes.

Now, a meeting like that isn’t enough to convince someone to kill himself, seen in isolation. But the meeting shows the toxic environment around Zach.

It was an environment where his very nature was up for debate and where a rejection of his nature was a valid part of the democratic discussion, whereas the same debate about black people or Jews would never have taken place at all.

While racism have not disappeared from our society, it has become taboo for the majority of people, and its expression has become very difficult in schools and in polite discourse. This is not the case for homophobia, which is still an acceptable posture if you frame it in particular ways, for instance as an aspect of religious discourse.

In that milieu Zach’s nature’s status was accepted as an atrocity by a large minority, and debating that nature with that minority was a perfectly normal part of the political conversation. Knowing that, we begin to see how Zach could come to the conclusion that suicide was the only option, as well as the only perceivable choice for the other boys.

When Justin Aaberg, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas and Asher Brown killed themselves, they were not doing so in a vacuum. Just like with Harrington, the environment drove the boys to suicide, and that environment was the same that we glimpsed in the open in the Norman City council meeting.

What we saw was that the boys’ natures were a legitimate subject for debate, and for condemnation. It was a point of order in the regular political discourse, although quite a few was bothered by the arguments. And if the points were raised in the meeting, the airing of them was legitimised by civil society in the form of the churches and the associations in the city, something the churches are asking themselves now.

In reflection, I wonder whether we are somehow complicit in creating an environment of alienation and despair.  In the Church’s attempt to assert it’s commitment to heterosexual marriage and to maintain that homosexuality is a moral disorder, does it help to create a cultural climate that tacitly legitimizes the stigmatization of gay young people?
— Russell Powell, an associate law professor at Seattle University School of Law

An answer to Powell’s question of this is the acceptance and even encouragement of that environment by the US newspaper Washington Post who after the string of suicides requested a counter-piece from Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council, a virulently anti-gay organisation, who promptly blamed the LGBT community and the victims for the suicides.

Both in the UK and the US the LGBT population live under various kinds of separate but equal provision at best, and I can point to the Civil partnership and marriage laws here in the UK. The CP-law is a separate provision for us in the LGBT-community, and is supposed to be equal, but all it does is slice our community out from the main to identify it as being apart.

In United States you additionally have directly discriminatory practices such as DOMA and DADT that tells us that we don’t qualify for equal protection under the laws, and that laws in fact must be enacted to stop our influence, which by definition is a pernicious one.

This as a result of compromises with a socially conservative movement that hates us, and the result of compromises with a movement in which pulpits are used as a weapon in a “culture war” aimed squarely at the “radical homosexual agenda” of school kids wanting to feel safe.

Some Christians have, as I’ve already mentioned, started to question this order, but for many kids hurting out there today it isn’t enough to have old men lock themselves in seminary debates in which the outcomes are doubtful in any event, and therefore people like Dan Savage started the “It gets better”-project partly in order to evade the timid bureaucrats in the school districts that even prevent fairly timid organisations like GLSEN from entering schools.

The quote does however ring in my ears when I read the reporting on the British Office for National Statistic’s recent survey of about 250000 Britons concerning their households.

The survey has come to the astonishing conclusion that there are a combined number of gay and bisexuals of 1.5%. An earlier 2004 survey conducted by the Treasury spoke of between 5-7 percent.

There are a number of flaws in the survey, which we will get into later, but needless to say the results have been met with glee by the people that don’t like gay people much.

– Now we have a clearer view of the real figures, we need to start asking serious questions about the vast sums of taxpayers’ money being spent on such a small minority, and the disproportionate amount of attention they receive both in Whitehall and in the media, says Norman Wells of the Family Education Trust.

In Britain there are a number of newspapers, primarily tabloids, that regularly gets into fits of morality and makes themselves look quite ridiculous.

True enough, Murdoch-owned The Sun and the Daily Mail have lead the charge casting doubts on us filthy queers over the day. The Daily Mail even dragged in Christians in the discussion, presumably to overwhelm us with the logic that Christian oppression is legitimate because there are more of them.

But as is the case with things like this, even more nuanced papers and news outlets have seized on the number, and have published them without analyzing the survey itself.

Britain is a strange country when it comes to LGBT-rights. You could call it a middle-country between a place like Sweden and a place like the United States.

As far as the laws go, the UK is doing all right, and when we finally get equalized marriage rights and a few other things, the UK will take its place among the leaders in LGBT-rights in the world.

However, socially there are still problems. LGBT acceptance is not very deep culturally because until about ten years ago it was illegal for schools to teach anything about homosexuality.

Gay kids still face massive amounts of bullying in schools, and surveys estimate that around 60 percent of gay school kids get physically abused because of their sexual orientation each year.

You still have media outlets like The Sun and the Daily Mail that regularly go on verbal pogroms against the “homosexual agenda” in Britain.

Particularly in the lower classes, it’s not healthy to be gay, even today. It’s in that light one has to view any movements in LGBT-rights, and this flawed survey plays right into that environment.

There are a number of things that are “wrong” with this survey, and the first and main one is the collection of it. The results were collected through phone interviews, and open polling where respondents were presented with cards to describe themselves.

In a country where homosexuality is not readily accepted, it is just inconceivable that people will be totally honest with pollsters when there is no anonymity.

The numbers are strange too, as 3 percent report that they don’t know whether they are gay, straight or bisexual. Another one percent outright refused to answer the question, and a further 0.5 percent said they were “other” than gay, straight or bisexual.

Lastly, even the ONS caution against the figures because the method used is described as “experimental”.

So, in a still fairly homophobic society, using an open polling method, where the numbers upon closer examination are dodgy, and where the pollsters themselves urges caution, one can only dismiss the survey.

However, as the tabloids are having a field day with the numbers, and where the legitimate news outlets are reporting it without further analysis, it can have adverse effects on LGBT in the UK.

While the Tories claim to be pro-gay these days, you can’t really trust the backbenchers about it. You can’t really trust the frontbenchers as we have seen again and again.

You can only view the voting records for a man like William Hague and find that he has consistently voted against most of the LGBT-issues that have been up for the vote in Parliament.

Lending credibility to this survey can lead to anti-gay sentiments in the Tory-party being solidified, particularly if the tabloids and the rest of the Murdoch-press make a concerted effort to set the debate agenda in an anti-gay light.

In a strange twist, the biggest LGBT-charity in the UK, Stonewall, seems to have come out against same-sex marriage. A report at PinkNews say that the chairman of the Equality-division views same-sex marriage as too expensive, and puts the tab at £5bn.

People are naturally outraged by this, and everyone I’ve spoken to about it directs quite a bit of ire against the organisation. I have yet to find one that shares Stonewall’s strange view on equality under the laws.

In Sweden the gays have it good. Right?

The fight is largely won, which has brought the country into the sights of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, who operate the site God Hates Sweden.

Still, as the country held its general election last Sunday two things were at the forefront of my mind.

One was that the openly gay parliamentarian Frederick Federley of the more libertarian Centre party was assaulted by four strangers outside his home.

Second was that the polished up and made-over neo-Nazi party, the Sweden Democrats, captured 5.7 percent of the popular vote and got into the country’s parliament.

In a poll conducted by European Union in 2006, 71 percent of the Swedes supported same sex marriages, for instance. No new such poll has been conducted since then.

The same-sex marriage law was passed in 2008 by the conservative-liberal coalition in power, became active on May 1st 2009. People rejoiced, and straight people rejoiced with everyone else.

Straight people do feel good about themselves, because they are tolerant and accepting. And no matter what issue, the majority society is behind LGBT-issues: from gay adoption to lesbian insemination.

They join in on the queer celebrations, and each July the capitol of Sweden hosts one of the continents biggest Pride parades.

Last August 35000 participants walked in the parade, and nearly half a million looked. This happened in Stockholm, a city with only about one million inhabitants.

Every politician of rank – including the Prime Minister – made a point to attend, and you even had a party leader debate about LGBT issues.

When asked, politician will give a vigorous defence of LGBT-rights, and even the Christian right will coat their antagonism in fine words to prevent public outrage.

So, Sweden would seem a fine country for gays, except that official statistics from the Crime Prevention Bureau (BRÅ) showed that about 1200 hate crimes were committed against LGBT-people in 2009.

That’s 24 hate crimes for every 10,000 LGTB-persons. The assault on Federley maybe wasn’t so unthinkable after all, nor was the election win of the Sweden Democrats.

As already mentioned, Sweden introduced same-sex marriage in 2008, and it has had gay adoptions since 2003. There has never been an issue about gays in the military.

There are strong anti-discrimination laws on the book, which is one reason why Fred Phelps hates Sweden.

In 2003 the Pentecostal pastor Åke Green was dragged to court for a sermon in which he called gays a “cancerous growth on society”, among other not so nice things.

He was eventually acquitted by the Swedish Supreme Court. However, even a clergyman in his own church isn’t safe from these laws.

Legally speaking, there seems to be nothing big left to do in Sweden. What remains the focus of the largest LGBT lobby group RFSL is to get some parenting issues sorted.

When Lesbians are inseminated (yes that’s legal too) it is not automatic that the woman’s spouse becomes a parent.

There are also transgender issues, like the requirement for sterilization in order to legally change your gender.

Gay men can go on do what gay men do; being fabulous.

If it just wasn’t for those hate crime statistics, and that the people committing the hate crimes just got parliamentary representation.

If you live in a country where national leaders condemn homosexuality and homosexuals, it might seem rich to problematize this utopia for gay people.

To paraphrase Jackie Kennedy, a queer would much rather cry in Sweden than in Texas. If you got all this equality in law, and if you have such strong anti-discrimination laws, what is the problem?

While I visited the old country I made a point to watch the TV networks, and found that they are clinically clean from gay people, stereotypes or not.

Gay people do exist in the few TV-series that survive transit from the UK or from the USA, and these shows only run on cable TV. The people I contacted to ask about it either didn’t understand the question, or simply didn’t bother to respond.

– I wouldn’t say we are bad at it, said a program director of the largest TV-corporation in Sweden. But it is a very niche market that we don’t have the budget to cover at the moment.

The overwhelming sense I get from the people I’ve talked to is that the majority loves you, and protects you, and accepts you, but they don’t engage with you.

The issues aren’t spoken of any longer, because we have got it all. Shouldn’t we just be happy about that?

If she does gag, then former Major Margaret Witt might be able to help. She’s a lesbian who lost her job in the US military when they found out that she was indeed gay. Now she wants her job back, and she’s gone to court to get it.

But if she does, get it back I mean, the world will descend into anarchy and chaos, and little children will possibly cry. That’s what the religious right in the US is asserting. As if that was new.

Thought if the world is ending because of teh gays, they might want to have a little chat with republican state senator John Brueggeman in Montana who wants to bring Montana into the 21st century by removing language from the Montana laws that forbids homosexuality.

And if jobs in the US military, or the romp in Montana, is too much of an effort and you want to get away to, say, a B&B in the UK you should know that 13 percent of Bed & Breakfasts in the country won’t let you sleep in the same bed as your partner.

Remember a couple of weeks back when it seemed that one Tory minister per day was walking out of the closet, or tumbling out of it as the case may be? Germany is way more cool and efficient about that, because there the openly gay foreign minister Guido Westerwelle has married his male sweetheart Michael Mronz.

Whether Stephen Fry wants to marry or not, I can not say. He is possibly to preoccupied with finding clever things to write on Twitter. However, this gay thing is not all that is him, he claims. In fact, he is only 90 percent gay now. What the remaining ten percent of him is, I do not know.

That is possibly more, or possibly less, than John Henry Newman. Never heard of him, have you? Neither had I until this day, but apparently the pope’s visit to the UK was all a ruse. He was in fact here to beatify Newman. Some think it’s a conspiracy – you know, to make the “moral wasteland” that is the UK rise from its “third world” status by having a proper English man as a saint.

But cricket player Jimmy Anderson is not a saint, nor is he getting married, but he is getting naked to prove a point. He wants to show that cricket isn’t a stuffy incomprehensible sport, so he sheds his threads in an upcoming issue of Attitude magazine. Looking at the picture above, I’m not entirely sure I want to miss out on that particular issue.

And whether it is associated with anything of the above or not, the conspiracy theorists can argue, but the Russian gay rights activist Nikolai Alekseev says he was kidnapped and possibly drugged by the Russian government. Maybe it was to prevent him marrying, being beatified, or even getting naked. Or it was more serious, like the Russian government pressuring him to drop his case before the European court of Human Rights.

Okay, they pay filthy high taxes, but at least they can marry whoever they want, and if they want a kid they can stomp down to an adoption agency and apply for one.

Not every issue has been solved. Lesbians still face the fact that if you’re inseminated, your spouse doesn’t automatically become the parent. Transgender people need to sterilize themselves before they can switch gender legally.

Such issues still remain to be solved, but there is no real fear that the new government that was elected on Sunday would act against it.

That does not, however, stop the same election results from being very worrying from an LGBT perspective.

The ruling Conservative-Liberal alliance (C+M+FP+KD in the diagram) won the election, and the Labour-Socialist-Green (S+V+MP) alliance lost it. That about sums it up.

The only part of the so called Red-green coalition that improved its lot were the greens, that advanced by two percentage points, compared to four years ago.

But a Conservative-Liberal win is not a disaster for Swedish LGBT-rights. It was, after all, the Conservative-Liberal alliance that ushered in same-sex marriages in the last session of parliament.

In Sweden, Conservative does not necessarily mean anti-gay. There are some elements of anti-gay among the Conservatives, of curse, but they tend to reside in the miniscule Christian Democrats with around 5 percent of the vote.

When the same-sex marriage vote was up, even the coalition partners ignored them and just voted the law through anyway. Nobody cares for the anti-gay in Sweden.

Labour made its absolutely worst election since the introduction of the popular vote. You have to go back to 1914 to find similar numbers for the once dominant party of Swedish politics.

This is the second consecutive election that the Social Democrats (Labour) has lost a big share of its vote. In 2006 they fell to about 35 percent of the vote. This time they fell to just shy of 31 percent.

For a party that just a decade ago was assured a forty percent share, or more, of the popular vote it’s a disaster. For a party that a decade ago saw a Conservative party hover around 15% in the polls, it is a dire tragedy.

Now the Conservatives are as big as Labour. And that stings deep in every Social Democrat, who have not accustomed themselves to being a party among others.

And if that wasn’t enough, with the introduction of a polished made-over neo-Nazi party the Sweden Democrats, Labour loses one of its big ambitions. Their stated aim was to keep he Sweden Democrats out of power.

The Sweden Democrats are no boon to the government, because the government alliance captured just 172 of the needed 175 seats in the parliament.

The Sweden Democrats gained 20 seats on Sunday, and the situation for continued governance without relying on the racists seem uncertain, although every other party has publically stated that they want nothing to do with the newcomers.

The concept of a hung parliament is on everyones minds in Sweden now, and it’s like having the BNP standing between the UK Labour and the Tories in the last election.

Not an enviable position for the government, and not an enviable position for LGBT because as a racist populist party, they are of course also raging homophobes.

The ignorable Christian Democrats had no influence on LGBT-issues in the previous session because they were so small. There was an overwhelming parliamentary support for the LGBT-issues.

Now, the anti-gay side has increased, and more than doubled. Instead of an ignorable five percent of the chamber, the anti-gay fringe has swelled to over 11 percent.

That could be all that is needed for our issues to grind to a staggering halt for the next four years. And if worst comes to worst, Sweden could degrade from being the ideal.

Time will tell.

Awesome little short that I couldn’t keep from you. I’ve been looking at gays on TV and in film lately, and stumbled on this.

To sum it up, there have been no focus at all on LGBT issues in the election, with one little caveat. The situation for LGBT-people have not come at all in this election that have been dominated by jobs, the economy and the state of the welfare state.

The caveat is that the polished up neo-nazi party Sweden Democrats might get parliamentary representation for the first time, and if that happens LGBT might face difficulties in the next session of parliament.

The estimate has just been published even as I write this. The labour bloc, consisting of Labour, the Left Party (former communists) and the green party is estimated to get 45,1 percent. The conservative-liberal block, which consists of the Conservatives, the two liberal parties, and the Christian Democrats  is estimated to get 49,1 %.

The Sweden Democrats are expected to get 4,6%, and therefore seems to squeak into parliament. The limit is 4%.