BuzzFeed: The Housing Crisis Is So Bad That Men Are Having To Sleep In Gay Saunas

Overseeing this comparative safety is the owner, Mark Ford. At 54, he has been running Sweatbox for over a decade and in the last few years has been balancing two competing stresses: trying to help gay men falling victim to the housing crisis, but also ensuring he sets boundaries that adhere to the restrictions on his business. There are, he says, no easy solutions.

“There was a point at which a Polish guy – who was very sweet – had his post redirected to us,” he says. “At that point we had to say, ‘You cannot live here.’ I’m not licensed as a hotel or as accommodation in any other way, so there are legal requirements.” As such, says Ford, “I might even shorten [customers’ stay] to a six-hour rule.” [...]

Against a backdrop of having to have sex with a succession of landlords, Sweatbox, for Spurr, was a break from exploitation. His use of such venues is typical among many who spoke to BuzzFeed News, describing it as part of the mix of ad-hoc, short-term arrangements on which they relied to avoid sleeping on the street: a few nights on a friend’s sofa, a night with someone they meet on Grindr, a couple of nights at a sauna, then repeat. [...]

“We had a period when we would get itinerant workers – non-gay guys coming over from Eastern Europe and wherever else – who were coming to London to work and they found out about this amazing place on the cheap,” says Ford.

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BuzzFeed: Russia's "Gay Propaganda" Ban Violates International Law, Top Human Rights Court Rules

Some regional governments in Russia adopted versions of this legislation beginning in 2003, and it was enacted nationwide in 2013, setting up a showdown over LGBT rights ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The law technically prohibits "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors," but authorities have also used the rule to justify shutting down LGBT rights protests, and to fine a newspaper for reporting on LGBT issues. The law led to an investigation of Apple after the company rolled out gay-friendly emojis for the iPhone, and has been invoked in bizarre campaigns against everything from a statue of a pair of dolphins, to a video of a tiger befriending a goat. [...]

"Above all, by adopting such laws the Court found that the authorities had reinforced stigma and prejudice and encouraged homophobia, which was incompatible with the values – of equality, pluralism and tolerance – of a democratic society," the ECHR wrote in an opinion agreed to by six of the seven judges who reviewed the case. [...]

"The Court found that the Government had been unable to provide any explanation of the mechanism by which a minor could be enticed into '[a] homosexual lifestyle', let alone science-based evidence that one’s sexual orientation or identity was susceptible to change under external influence," the judges wrote. [...]

The Russian Ministry of Justice vowed to appeal the ruling, which is supposed to bind the courts of Russia under the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights. But Russia has repeatedly thumbed its nose at the ECHR's authority in recent years, including adopting legislation in 2015 allowing for ECHR rulings to be ignored when they contradict the Russian Constitution.

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BuzzFeed: This Is What Happens To Women’s Rights When The Far-Right Takes Over

But when it came to something as sensitive as changing the abortion law, a democratic imprimatur was important. So conservative groups joined forces, consulted with PiS, and brought the ban to legislators as a “citizens’ initiative” — not the pet project of one parliamentarian but an idea backed by nearly half a million signatures, most of them collected after Sunday mass. [...]

Veteran protesters hoped they might draw a couple thousand people out on the streets of Warsaw over the course of the day. Government officials scoffed at the idea before it even began. “Let them play,” Poland’s foreign minister said.

Play they did. An estimated 30,000 women flooded the streets of the capital, forcing buses and cars into U-turns. “The whole day, Warsaw was blocked,” remembered Krystyna Kacpura, director of the Federation for Women and Family Planning, a non-governmental organization in Warsaw. [...]

The new law takes a soft touch to the most heated part of Poland’s abortion debate: whether women should be allowed to abort “imperfect” pregnancies. Abortion opponents call this part of the law the “eugenic exception,” which elicits memories of Poland’s painful past: Eugenics was a pseudoscience, developed in the United States and Great Britain, that supposed a racial hierarchy among the world’s populations. It helped underpin the Nazi belief in “Aryan” superiority, a belief that led to a mass sterilization campaign in the early days of Nazism and, eventually, to the murder of “inferior peoples,” especially Jews, in the Nazi death camps of eastern Poland. [...]

Ordo Iuris, the Catholic think tank that drafted the ban, pushes “pro-life” logic a step further — by borrowing liberal human rights rhetoric and repurposing it for a fight against abortion. For Ordo Iuris, banning abortion isn’t just about protecting life; it’s about “the principle of equality before the law.” If society doesn’t tolerate discrimination against people because of age or disability, the group argues, why should society let pregnant mothers “discriminate” against their own fetuses? From this perspective, an abortion ban is actually the logical conclusion of a liberal values system. As Ordo Iuris’s website puts it, banning abortion is really just eliminating “legal discrimination against people in their prenatal period of development.”

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BuzzFeed: The Man Who Turned Gay Rights Into “A Weapon” In A War Against Muslims

For months they had endured an increasingly strident debate about immigration ahead of elections on March 15, and they were tired of being caught in the crossfire. The race has been dominated by Geert Wilders, the bleached-blonde leader of the Party for Freedom who polls show could win the largest bloc of votes in parliament. His candidacy is being watched as the next test of the nationalist wave that drove Britain out of the EU and put Donald Trump in the White House.

But the race is also uniquely focused on gay rights, because Wilders has framed his crusade against Islam in part as a defense of national values in the country proud to have adopted the world’s first marriage equality law and has remained a leader on LGBT rights in the years since. And several more moderate politicians have echoed the message that Muslim immigrants threaten gay people.[...]

Wilders’ professed support of gay rights once put him out of step with other nationalist politicians in the West, who generally have also been social conservatives. But today Wilders seems like he was just ahead of his time, with politicians from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen following his lead and saying they are defending LGBT rights by opposing Muslim immigration. [...]

Immigrants are constantly being subjected to a “pink test,” said Dino Suhonic, founder of the queer Muslim organization Maruf and organizer of the evening’s gathering. Politicians are “using gay rights, as almost a [trait of] national identity,” Suhonic said, but only when debating the place of “asylum-seekers and the immigrants.” It’s an attitude Suhonic calls “homonationalism.” [...]

Ineke cited a 2009 study commissioned by the Department of Justice that found that 86% of people accused of violence against LGBT people in the Netherlands were of Dutch background and 14% of immigrant background, roughly equal to their representation in the population as a whole. Another analysis by researchers at the University of Amsterdam of anti-LGBT violence just within their city did find that people of Moroccan descent were overrepresented among suspected perpetrators, but also found that people from Turkish backgrounds were underrepresented and less likely to commit these crimes than people of Dutch descent. Religion was not the issue, the researchers concluded, but rather a “street culture” specific to Moroccan young men that “enforces hyper-masculine behavior.”

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BuzzFeed: There’s A Plan For California To Secede From The US, But It Probably Won’t Work

Members of the “Yes California” initiative filed a proposed ballot measure Monday that would let California residents vote on whether the state should try to break away from the rest of the country. The goal is to get the measure on the ballot in 2018 — something that will happen if organizers collect more than half a million signatures.

If the measure passes at the ballot box, it would eliminate part of the state constitution describing California as an “an inseparable part of the United States of America.”

Passing the measure would then lead to a special election in 2019 where voters would decide if they want to leave the United States and become their own country. [...]

Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, described the odds of California breaking away from the United States as “one in a billion.” Farber said the Golden State would face an array of challenges if it seceded, including deals over everything from trade to energy to copyrights on Hollywood films. [...]

Instead, he explained, California would need the consent of other states to leave the US. How exactly that consent could be given is unclear — this particular issue hasn’t come up before — though it could ultimately require a constitutional amendment. And either way, it would require the very lawmakers Californians want to break away from to get on board with the plan.

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BuzzFeed: Marriage Equality Generates Unprecedented Backlash In Mexico

A coalition called the National Front for the Family is organizing a protest Saturday in cities throughout the country, including one in Guadalajara that organizers claim could attract as many as 100,000 people. A follow-up march is planned to converge in Mexico City on September 24. In protests held last weekend, including one in Mexico City under the banner of “For Life and Family,” organizers delivered a petition reportedly signed by 300,000 people calling on Congress to pass a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

The protests won the endorsement of a group of Catholic bishops, who circulated a letter declaring “we support and encourage the coalition” and calling on their peers to “encourage and promote enthusiastic and creative participation of all individuals, families and groups” in the upcoming marches. [...]

This rapid politicization is a new challenge for Mexican LGBT groups. The country has never had a strong national LGBT rights organization, and infighting has sometimes made collaboration difficult. But there’s been a new level of communication following the president’s announcement, activists say, including a meeting that drew activists from across the country to the city of Cuernavaca late last month that hammered out principles to respond to the growing backlash.

They are now putting a good deal of effort in trying to flip the debate into a referendum on the separation of church and state. Mexico has a long tradition of limiting the church’s involvement in politics — for much of Mexican history priests were not allowed to vote — and LGBT activists are trying to portray religious opposition to marriage equality as crossing a bright line.

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BuzzFeed: Support For EU Membership Is On The Rise In Several Countries After Brexit

In Denmark, a Voxmeter poll shows that nearly 7 in 10 Danes now support EU membership, up from 60% a week before Britain’s vote. The same poll found support for holding a referendum dropping to 32% from 41% over the course of the same seven days.

In Finland, a poll released last week also saw a rise in support for EU membership: up from 56% in March to 68%. In Sweden, backing for EU membership has seen a smaller increase compared with earlier levels, but is nevertheless supported by a majority (52%) according to a TNS Sifo poll carried out after the UK referendum. [...]

Meanwhile, in Europe’s largest economy, Germany, 82% of respondents polled by Forsa said they would vote to remain in the EU if a referendum were held in their country. Only 14% would back leaving the EU. More than 70% are opposed to a UK-style referendum, according to the same poll published on the Monday after Britain’s vote. [...]

Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National (FN), who was all smiles on 24 June, has pledged to hold a referendum on EU membership if elected president in 2017. According to opinion polls, Le Pen is currently on track to make the second-round run-off in next year’s presidential election.

However, experts suggest that unless Brexit turns out to be a runaway success for the UK, Le Pen will find it extremely difficult to carve out a path to the presidency on an anti-EU platform because dislike for the EU is not the same as wanting to exit.

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BuzzFeed: Here’s Why A Pro-EU Party Could Be Screwed At The Next General Election

To see how the country’s referendum vote could affect a general election, we’ve translated the referendum results (which in England, Scotland and Wales were counted by council area, not constituency) into results broken down by parliamentary seats.

And when you do that, you get a radically different outcome. Instead of a close result, Leave win in a landslide.

Although the referendum result was close nationally, Remain piled up many of its votes in a relatively small number of constituencies (London and Scotland being prime examples). As a result, the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system would produce an extremely skewed result. [...]

That’s backed up by the fact that political scientist Chris Hanretty conducted a similar exercise using a more complex methodology, and he came out with a very similar result: looking at just English and Welsh constituencies, he predicted that 421 out of the 574 would have voted Leave. (Our count includes Scotland and Northern Ireland as well.) [...]

Obviously people vote on many issues in a general election, not just one. But it does suggest that a Labour party with a manifesto commitment to reversing Brexit might have a stuggle winning these vital seats. That’s especially true if a snap election is called in the next six months or so – before any likely economic effects of Brexit on jobs, housing and the cost of living have really kicked in.

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Buzzfeed: Britain To Offer Next-Of-Kin Letters To Same-Sex Couples Travelling Abroad

British same-sex married couples travelling abroad will be able to obtain an official letter from the UK government confirming their next-of-kin status in a world-first aimed at preventing LGBT citizens being denied their rights.

The trailblazing new policy – no other country currently offers this – was prompted by the sudden death four months ago of a British gay man on his honeymoon in Australia. His husband had to suffer the indignity of being told by the state authorities that the death certificate would read “never married” as same-sex marriage was not recognized.

The move will mean that anyone in a civil partnership or marriage will be able to present the document to hospital staff, police, funeral directors, donor organisations, or any officials they might encounter in the event of their spouse being taken ill or dying in a foreign country.

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