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Catholic-Funded NOM Exporting Anti-Gay Efforts To Countries That Persecute Gays

In case the National Organization for Marriage has not significantly proven its intent to “drive a wedge” between racial groups by “fanning hostility,” its latest action is the most detestable yet. Today, NOM’s Brian Brown announced it will be exporting its Dump Starbucks campaign — a massive failure stateside — to countries that are significantly less supportive of LGBT rights:

BROWN: In our first week, we gained 25,000 pledge signers in the U.S. alone; today we go international, expanding DumpStarbucks.com campaigns into Mandarin, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, and Bahala (one of the chief languages of Indonesia). DumpStarbucks.com online ads will also start running in Egypt, Beijing, Hong Kong, the Yunnan region of China, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait.

What happens in Seattle won’t to stay in Seattle. By making gay marriage core to his brand, Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz is telling millions of customers and partners who support traditional marriage in the Middle East, China, South America and North America that they aren’t truly part of the Starbucks community.

As Joe.My.God. notes, NOM is specifically targeting countries that criminalize homosexuality, like Kuwait and Oman, and even some that punish it with the death penalty, like the United Arab Emirates. The Dump Starbucks webpage tells its visitors that the coffee company’s support of marriage equality will “eliminate” the “definition of marriage between one man and one woman.” Sowing such seeds of fear in countries already opposed to homosexuality extends far beyond “fanning hostility” and could foster increased hostilities against people just for the coffee they choose to drink.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Campaign and Freedom to Marry note that the Catholic Church hierarchy and its affiliates like the Knights of Columbus continue to be NOM’s biggest funders. And while millions of dollars are being funneled into race-dividing anti-gay strategies, soup kitchens, shelters, and other advocacy efforts are closing due to lack of funds, in many cases specifically as punishment by the Church for being LGBT-inclusive. In a letter to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Freedom to Marry and HRC implore the Church to immediately stop funding NOM and supporting its “race-baiting, ethnic exploitation, division, and anti-gay campaigns.” With the expansion of the Dump Starbucks campaign, add “propagating violence” to that list.

Climate Progress

October 26 News: Kuwait Sets Up Biggest Renewable Energy Effort in Gulf with $112 Billion Push, 10% Target for 2010

Other important stories: China Urges End to Climate Talk Deadlock; Cleantech Venture Capitalists Split on Strategy

Solar panels in the desert at Masdar in Abu Dhabi, UAE

Kuwait Sets Biggest Gulf Clean-Energy Goal to Free Up Oil

Sun-drenched Kuwait, a desert nation with no solar-power plants and electricity demand that’s growing about 8 percent a year, has set the most ambitious target for using renewable energy in the Gulf region.

OPEC’s fifth-biggest oil producer, whose air conditioners run cheaply off state-subsidized oil-fired power plants, aims to generate 10 percent of its electricity from sustainable sources by 2020, said Eyad Ali al-Falah, assistant undersecretary for technical services at the Ministry of Electricity and Water.

Kuwait is trying to free up oil for export and expand its generation capacity to support increased tourism, manufacturing and home building in a $112 billion development program. To meet its clean-energy target, which exceeds the 7 percent goal set by Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait next must gather data on sunshine and wind speeds, al-Falah said.

“Renewable energy is a new subject for Kuwait,” al-Falah, who coordinates alternative energy for the ministry, said in an interview at its headquarters outside Kuwait City. “That’s why there’s a lack of information regarding the suitability of renewables for our weather.”

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Yglesias

Passports for Kuwaiti Women

504px-Coat_of_Arms_of_Kuwait-2.svg 1 1

I saw on the Abu Aardvark twitter feed early this morning that Kuwait women have won the right to travel and obtain a passport without the consent of their husband. That’s obviously appropriate on its own terms, but I was interested to further learn that this wasn’t a royal decree but a ruling of the country’s constitutional court. Indeed, in recent years Kuwait seems to have evolved in a more democratic direction in recent years than I’d realized:

It is the latest gain for women in the oil-rich Gulf state which has made a number of strides towards gender equity in recent years.

The presence of female MPs followed the granting of equal political rights in 2005.

I don’t exactly know how to characterize Kuwait’s political system. It’s a kind of old-school constitutional monarchy in which there’s a meaningful role for elections and parliament but the royal family also exercises meaningful governing authority. I’m also led to believe that Kuwait has significant human rights problems in terms of the treatment of migrant domestic workers and criminal penalties for “imitating the appearance of the opposite sex” by wearing inappropriate clothing. But presumably all that is just part of Human Rights Watch’s well-known anti-Israel bias and can be safely ignored.

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