Box Turtle Bulletin

Mexico’s President Proposes Federal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriages and Gender Identification

Los Pinos, the official office and residence of the President of Mexico.

One important way to understand how a few things are supposed to work in Mexico is to recall that the country’s official name translates as the Mexican United States. This refers to the fact that like here in the U.S.A., Mexico’s system of government is designed to work on a federalist model, with some powers reserved for the national government, and some powers reserved for the states. Their lines on which powers go where are drawn differently than here in the U.S., but in one way they are the same: only states can regulate what constitutes a valid marriage. The federal government’s role, like in the U.S., is limited to deciding what marriages the government will recognize. Mexico’s federal government cannot mandate marriage equality nationwide, nor can it prohibit it. It can, however, make perfectly legal and valid same-sex marriages irrelevant with regard to what gets recognized at the federal level.

And so as was the case in the U.S. under the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred our federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage even in states where those marriages were legal, Mexico’s Federal Civil Code also bars the national recognition of same-sex marriage even in the eight of Mexico’s 31 states, plus the Federal District, where same-sex marriage is legal.

There are only two mechanisms by which the federal government can impose same-sex marriage on the states. The first involves a very lengthy multi-year long process by which the Mexican Supreme Court can strike down marriage restrictions in each individual state, but it can only do that one state at a time, and even then it can only do that if it reaches the same conclusion five times in a row in five individual states. The Supreme Court has already done this a number of times, and has more or less ordered lower court judges to do the same when similar cases are filed in their jurisdictions. The second method is via a constitutional amendment, which rarely happens and is fraught with political peril. For example, marriage equality opponents could hijack the process to impose a national ban on same-sex marriage.

With all of that taken together, this announcement that was posted to the Presidential web site seems so important. Here is a highly unofficial translation:

The President of the Republic, Enrique Peña Nieto, led the ceremony of the National Day of the Fight Against Homophobia, at the residence of Los Pinos.

“I reaffirm my Government’s commitment to non-discrimination and building a Mexico, like you, Ari also said so, truly inclusive, where all people can exercise their rights fully.”

…He submitted proposals to the Secretariat of the Interior [which formally presents the president’s bills to Congress — JB] and the National Council to Prevent Discrimination, so that together with the competent agencies, they can analyze each of the proposals and, where appropriate, take necessary actions to address them.

The first package of reforms sent to Congress stemming from the recommendations of the Dialogues for Everyday Justice, calls for the identification and reform of Mexican legal standards including discriminatory content.

From this, four presidential determinations were derived:

First. An initiative to reform Article 4 of the Constitution was signed to clearly incorporate the judgment of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation which recognized as a human right that people can marry without discrimination.

That is, that marriages are made without discrimination based on ethnic or national origin, disability, social status, health conditions, religion, gender or sexual preference. Thus, equal marriage would be explicit in the Constitution.

“I do it with the conviction that the Mexican State must prevent discrimination for any reason and to ensure equal rights for all people.”

Second. An initiative to reform the Federal Civil Code was sent to ensure equal marriage. So that it can be carried out without discrimination among people over 18 years, in line with what already establishes the General Law on the Rights of Children and Adolescents.

This reform proposal modernizes the language to avoid discriminatory expressions which still exists in the Federal Code. It also contemplates that consulates, in its role as Civil Registry Judges, can issue new birth certificates to recognize gender identity.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs received directives to take the necessary steps so that, in the passport application process, it will recognize and accept, without any distinction, birth certificates which register a change in gender.

Third. The Legal Counsel of the Federal Executive, together with the institutions that participated in the Dialogs for Everyday Justice, are to identify any other federal, state or municipal law which could involve some form of discrimination, in accordance with the criteria of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation.

For this determination to be democratic and inclusive, a micro site on page of the Presidency of the Republic will open to receive citizen proposals. These will be analyzed by the Ministry itself, CIDE and the Institute of Legal Research of UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico), in order to propose the necessary legal changes needed to eliminate discrimination.

In the case of local or municipal regulations, it will inform those authorities of those levels of government of proposals to initiate a reform process.

Fourth. Mexico, as an actor with global responsibility, will be part of the Nucleus Group on Homosexual, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender or Intersex Persons of the United Nations, in which 19 countries from different regions are involved, and which promote human rights internationally.

“Today, as we are here witnessing, having this meeting is very important in the evolution, that as a society we are taking a step. That the Government of Mexico has the conviction and wants to promote, and want to really ensure that in our country all and all Mexicans, regardless of their social status, religion, sexual preference, their ethnicity, no matter what his condition, has the opportunity to be fully realized, and has a chance to be happy.”

Alabama’s Proposed “Bathroom Bill”: A Shift in Tactics

Yesterday, I noted that Alabama State Sen. Phil Williams (R-Rainbow City, ironically) filed a filed a bill requiring anyone that makes restrooms available to the public to do so “in a manner that ensures the privacy of each individual.” That bit of news came from a brief article I found posted by the Florence Times Daily. Details were sketchy, but they included:

Williams said that can be done in three ways. By having:

• restroom, bathroom or changing facilities that are designed to be used by one person at a time.

• restroom, bathroom or changing facilities that are designed to be used by multiple persons of the same biological gender.

• restroom, bathroom or changing facilities that are designed to be used by multiple persons at once, irrespective of their gender, that are “staffed by an attendant stationed at the door of each restroom to monitor the appropriate use of the restroom and answer any questions or concerns posed by users.”

A few hours after I posted it and while I was doing other things away from the computer, I thought more about this and realized that there was something strange about this bill. Or, perhaps more accurately, the paper’s description of the bill, since I haven’t been able to find the bill itself. (It’s not yet listed on the Alabama Senate web site.) This bill, as far as I can tell so far, seems to focus exclusively on those who provide public facilities, and not on those who use them.

In other words, it seems to target Target more so than trans men and women. And in that way, it seems to anticipate the possibility that North Carolina’s law may be struck down in court. The law is currently being challenged by the ACLU and Lambda Legal, and by the Obama Administration in a separate case.

I wish I knew about this yesterday, but I found an op-ed Williams wrote last week for Al.com where he confirmed this approach:

Sen. Phil Williams

As I write this, a big-box retailer with multiple outlets in this state has decided to make all of their multi-stall restrooms unisex, with a complete disregard for long-standing law, tradition and biology. More egregiously, this decision was made with no concern for the privacy and security concerns of their customers. In essence, Target has thrown out the rule in favor of the exception.

In North Carolina, the city of Charlotte passed an ordinance requiring public restrooms to allow persons to use bathrooms according to their own gender self-identification. … That law is being litigated even now and Alabama must be ready by the next legislative session to deal with the outcome.

…If North Carolina’s law is struck down then my legislation will become a backstop to say that if any person or entity provides public restrooms, bathrooms, or changing facilities then they will do so in one of three ways: a single user facility; facilities separated by the physical gender of the users; or, if facilities are provided in a unisex/transgender manner, an attendant for each facility must be onsite to address any concerns or questions of the general public. Failure to do so would result in civil penalties and provide a private right of action in court for those individuals who have been harmed or aggrieved.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From Albatros (Houston, TX), October 1, 1965, page 6. (Source.)

From Albatros, October 1, 1965, page 5. (Source.)

Houston’s Red Room, which first opened in 1964, was a very well known upscale club that, by 1970, featured (gasp!) dancing:

I don’t know what to expect next! The Red Room is the first and only beer bar open to the public with dancing. Dancing is not new to Houston in the gay clubs but in beer bars where membership is required, unheard of. There has been a sizeable investment as well as time put into this feature for your enjoyment. If you haven’t been in lately go see the new additions in this going establishment. Red Room has for years been a symbol in Houston’s gay night life. I wonder if the management will have music that the older group might enjoy dancing to or will it be for the swingers only? Much luck “Big George”

— From Nuntius (Houston, TX), August 1970, page 17.

But just five months later, the Red Room drew a demonstration by the University of Houston’s Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which called attention the the club’s racial discrimination policies. The GLF demonstrated and handed out flyers reading (PDF:613KB/5 pages):

BOYCOTT THE RED ROOM — The Gay Liberation Front of Houston regrets that the gay brothers and sisters of Houston are not together. The management of a local Gay Bar, the Red Room unfortunately refuses service to blacks. The discriminatory actions of the Red Room management are clearly racist moves that are a continuation of the repressive and racist attitudes of white Houstonians. These racist attitudes oppress all gays as long as the Red Room and others discriminate against blacks. Disposal of oppressive attitudes is a necessity and demand. We are all prisoners of the Amerikan death culture.

Ironically, Red Room’s management called the police to complain about the demonstrators. Ironically, I say, because the Houston police were notorious for raiding gay bars and harassing gay people. The Red Room was still in business in 1974, but it appears to have disappeared by early 1975. If you go to the address today, you’ll see what looks like a fairly new building housing a franchise of a Chicago-based  dueling-piano bar chain.

Emphasis Mine: Why Do Greek Statues Have Small Penises?

Ellen at the How To Talk About Art History blog has the answer, with NSFW examples:

Firstly, they’re flaccid. If you compare their size to most flaccid male penises, they are actually not significantly smaller than real-life penises tend to be. Secondly, cultural values about male beauty were completely different back then. Today, big penises are seen as valuable and manly, but back then, most evidence points to the fact that small penises were considered better than big ones.

…All representations of large penises in ancient Greek art and literature are associated with foolish, lustful men, or the animal-like satyrs. Meanwhile, the ideal Greek man was rational, intellectual and authoritative. He may still have had a lot of sex, but this was unrelated to his penis size, and his small penis allowed him to remain coolly logical.

Coolly logical. Like me.

Today In History, 1990: Gays Cured Worldwide

It’s amazing that it took so long, but the World Health Organization finally removed homosexuality from the tenth edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (also known as ICD-10). It took the WHO nearly seventeen years to catch up with the American Psychiatric Association (see Dec 15), and when they did they followed the APA’s same cautious approach by including the diagnosis of “Ego-Dystonic Sexual Orientation,” for those who were troubled by their homosexuality. That diagnosis served as a loophole allowing therapists to continue to try to “cure” gay people of a mental disorder that no longer existed. The APA removed that diagnosis from its list of mental disorders in 1987. It is still in the WHO’s list of disorders, but last year, the Working Group on the Classification of Sexual Disordrs and Sexual Health recommended its removal (PDF) from ICD-11, which is due to be released in 2017.

Today in History, 2004: Massachusetts Becomes First State With Marriage Equality

Six months earlier, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in a 4-3 ruling, found that the state could not bar same-sex couples from marrying and gave the legislature 180 days to “take such action as it may deem appropriate” before issuing licenses to gay couples (See Nov 18). The state Senate responded by asking whether civil unions would suffice, but the four justice who made up the majority of the original decision wrote, “The dissimilitude between the terms ‘civil marriage’ and ‘civil union’ is not innocuous; it is a considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same-sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status.”

Republican Gov. Mitt Romney issued a statement supporting an amendment to the state constitution which would have banned both same-sex marriage and civil unions (reversing a 2002 campaign promise that he had made to gain the endorsement of the Log Cabin Club of Massachusetts) but the legislature narrowly defeated it. The second proposal, a compromise amendment which would have banned marriage equality only,” mustered enough support, with Romney’s reluctant support (he still preferred the first proposal) to be held for a second vote a year later (proposed constitutional amendments require 25% support in two consecutive years before being passed on to voters). Meanwhile, the legislature took no action to implement the court’s decision.

On May 17, the day the court’s decision was due to go into effect, Gov. Romney cited a 1913 law prohibiting non-residents from marrying in Massachusetts if the marriage would not be valid in their home state, and instructed town clerks to deny marriage licenses to out-of-state gay couples. The 1913 law, which had been enacted to block interracial marriages for out-of-state couples subject to Jim Crow laws in their home states, hadn’t been enforced in decades.

When the compromise proposed constitutional amendment came up for a second vote in 2005, Gov. Romney withdrew his support, saying that it confused voters who wanted to ban both same-sex marriage and civil unions. The measure lost the necessary support in the legislature. Romney then backed a revival of the first proposed amendment which would have banned marriage and civil unions both, but that proposal failed to gain the necessary 25% support in the state legislature in 2006. Romney left office in 2007, and the 1913 law was repealed in 2008.

Today In History, 2004: IOC Allows Trans Athletes To Compete As Self-Identified Gender

The International Olympic Committee ruled that post-operative transgender people will be able to compete in events in Athens according to their self-identified gender, provided the new gender is legally recognized and the athlete is two years into post-operative hormonal therapy. IOC Medical Commission Chairman Arne Ljungqvist announced the rule change in response to the increasing numbers of transgender athletes attempting to qualify for Olympic competition. “Although individuals who undergo sex reassignment usually have personal problems that make sports competition an unlikely activity for them, there are some for whom participation in sport is important,” he said. The IOC’s rule change came about after it become apparent that case-by-case evaluations were insufficient. Transgender advocates criticized the post-operative requirements, noting that many athletes cannot afford the surgeries where national or private health insurance doesn’t cover it.

Born On This Day, 1919: Merle Miller

(d. 1986) The Iowa native was marked from the beginning: bookish, played the violin and piano, work thick glasses. The other kids called him sissy from the moment he started school. “I heard that word at least five days a week for the next 13 years until I skipped town and went away to college.” He studied at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. During World War II, he was a war correspondent and editor for Yank, The Army Weekly. After the war, he was an editor at Time and Harper’s magazine, and he wrote several best-selling novels, including his classic That Winter (1948), which portrayed the difficulties of veterans’ post-war readjustment. His non-fiction books included We Dropped the A-Bomb (1946), which was based on interviews with a crewman for one of the three B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1952, he exposed the workings of the Hollywood blacklist in a book commissioned by the ACLU and published by Doubleday, The Judges and the Judged. “A large segment of one of this country’s largest industries remains panicked, partly by the hysteria of the times, partly by what is, relatively, one of the country’s smallest corporations, American Business Consultants, and a handful of supporters. All of the 151 lists are stained with the same careless red paint.” Miller knew very well the damage that inclusion in the McCarthy-inspired blacklist: he himself ended up on it, which kept him from developing a nascent career as a script writer.

One of his most famous books began as a series of interviews that he recorded with former President Harry Truman in 1962. His original plan was to produce a television documentary series bot all three networks turned it down. He suspected that his having been blacklisted in the 1950s may have been a contributing factor. Miller filed the tapes and notes away, not sure of what to do with them. When Truman died in 1972, the TV networks invited Miller to appear on camera and share some of his Truman stories, which he had been telling to entertain his friends and colleagues for the past decade. That’s when he decided the time was right to write that book. It would be no ordinary biography, but a book of conversations between Miller and Truman titled Plain Speaking. When it came out in 1974 (after at least eight publishers turned it down), it rose to number one on the New York Times best-selling list, and it remained on the list for over a year.

Miller remained closeted throughout most of his career, but the heady days of the post-Stonewall era changed that. In October 1970, Harper’s magazine, Miller’s former employer, published a homophobic screed by Joseph Epstein calling  gay people “an affront to our rationality …  condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men.” (Oct 27)  While meeting with two New York Times editors for lunch, Norman complained bitterly about the article. The other editors didn’t see anything wrong with it, and couldn’t understand why Miller was so upset. “Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual … and I’m sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.” The editors were taken aback, but a few days later, they approached Miller about writing a piece for The New York Times Magazine (which then enjoyed complete editorial independence from the Times newspaper).

His essay, “What It Means To Be A Homosexual,”was a bombshell in the mainstream press (Jan 17).The Times’s mailroom was inundated with more than 2,000 letters in the first six weeks, a record. Almost all of them from gay people and their parents expressing their gratitude for Miller’s honesty. It also opened the eyes of a number of straight readers, who were able to see gay people as just people. One reader, who was careful to avoid using epithets for racial, ethnic and religious minorities, admitted, “Yet for every time I’ve said homosexual, I’ve said ‘fag’ a thousand times. You’ve made me wonder how I could have believed that I had modeled my life on the dignity of man while being so cruel, so thoughtless to so many.” Later that year, his essay was published again in book form as On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual. Penguin Classics re-issued it again in 2012 with a foreword by Dan Savage and afterword by Charles Kaiser.

Born On This Day, 1929: Jill Johnston

(d. 2010) She hired on as a dance critic for the Village Voice in 1959, and became a fixture among dancers, composers, artists, poets, performance artists and the avant-garde generally in the city. Her dance column soon evolved to encompass a much wider scale. “I had a forum obviously set up for covering or perpetrating all manner of outrage,” she later wrote.

At Town Bloody Hall

She perpetrated her most famous outrage in 1971, during a panel discussion in New York’s Town Hall on feminism with Normal Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos, who was then the National Organization for Women’s president. The debate was called in reaction to Mailer’s anti-feminist rebuttal, The Prisoner of Sex. Johnston took to the lectern and recited a poetic manifesto (titled “On a Clear Day You Can See Your Mother”) and announced that “all women are lesbians except those who don’t know it yet,” After Johnston exceeded her allotted ten minutes, Mailer became impatient and demanded she leave the stage. “Come on, Jill, be a lady,” Mailer mocked, before calling for a vote to determine whether she should continue. That’s when two other women joined Johnston on the stage, and the three began kissing and hugging, and soon they were rolling on the floor. When Mailer got up to introduce the next speaker from the lectern, the trio quietly left the stage, having successfully upstaged Mailer and rendering the rest of the debate mostly forgettable. Feminist author Kate Millett later said, “Jill made a wonderful performance art piece out of it. She wasn’t going to debate anything.” That performance has since been immortalized in a 1979 documentary as “Town Bloody Hall“.

Jill Johnston with Dick Cavett, 1973

In 1973, Johnston collected a series of Village Voice essays for her radical lesbian feminism manifesto, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution.. In it, she began championing a separatist brand of lesbian feminism, labeling women’s relationships with the men a collaboration with the enemy. “Many feminists are now stranded between their personal needs and their political persuasions,” she wrote. “The lesbian is the woman who unites the personal and political in the struggle to free ourselves from the oppressive institution [of marriage] …. By this definition lesbians are in the vanguard of the resistance.”

What she wrote was only somewhat more controversial than how she wrote.  Her Voice columns were famous for following the hippie-freeform esthetic of the era, which one critic described as “part Gertrude Stein, part E. E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure.” She spurned paragraphs, capitalization, and punctuations, and adopted a style that she described as “collage-like assemblages.” Her method was so controversial that in the late 1960s, Andy Warhol and other avant-garde artists held a panel discussion about her work titled “The Disintegration of a Critic.” She later described those days as her “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution.”

But by the time she wrote those word in 1973, she was already moving to a more conventional tone. She began writing for the magazine Art in America and the New York Times Review of Books, and she published two personal memoirs, Mother Bound (1983) and Paper Daughter (1985). She described her 1996 book Jasper Johns: Privileged Information as “my first ‘mature’ work. Its publication was very controversial, ostensibly because I used so much biography in backing up my views and descriptions of the artist’s work, but possibly more because of the radical reputation that preceded me. …Retrospectively, I see Lesbian Nation as a period piece.” In The New Yorker, she described herself as “an R.L.F.W. — a recovering lesbian from the feminist wars.”

By the 1990s, she had become something of traitor to her 1970s self. Having scorned marriage in Lesbian Nation, she married her spouse, Ingrid Nyeboe, in Denmark in 1993, and again in Connecticut in 2009. She also became an ardent Obama supporter in 2005 with her book At Sea on Land: Extreme Politics, which led to her passing over a chance to support Hillary Clinton in 2008. If she was now a reformed separatist lesbian, the emphasis should probably be placed on reformed, which is not at all synonymous with abandoned: “The centrality of the lesbian position to feminist revolution — wildly unrealistic or downright mad, as it still seems to most women everywhere — continues to ring true and right.”

Born On This Day, 1950: Howard Ashman

(d. 1991) Playwright and lyricists, Ashman first achieved acclaim for his collaboration with Alan Menken on Little Shop of Horrors. That collaboration put the songwriting duo on a course for greater hits to come. In 1986, Ashman wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation and wrote the lyrics for two new songs, “Some Fun Now” and “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space, both of which received an Academy Award nomination.

In 1989, he was co-producer, lyricist and occasional writer for Disney’s The Little Mermaid, the animated blockbuster that had overnight saved Disney from what appeared to be imminent bankruptcy after a long series of flops since the death of Old Walt. It was Ashman’s idea to give Sebastian the Crab a Jamaican accent, and the calypso song, “Under the Sea,” earned Ashman and Menkin the 1989 Oscar for Best Original Song. Ashman died in 1991 of complications from AIDS shortly after completing work on the Disney films Beauty and the Beast from his death bed, and before he could complete Aladdin. After he died, three of the songs from Beauty and the Beast were nominated for Best Song at the Academy Awards, with the title song winning the Oscar. Ashman was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2001, and Beauty and the Beast is dedicated to him. Ashman was survived by his partner, architect William Lauch.

Born On This Day, 1956: Annise Parker

The Houston native had worked for over 20 years in the oil and gas industry as a software analyst, but she was never far from public service. In 1986, she was president of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, which is the South’s oldest LGBT organization. Taking the position at the height of the AIDS scare was daunting “It was a scary, very different time,” she said. “The two most visible lesbian activists in Houston were myself and Sue Lovell (who later became a City Council member). We had regular death threats, our tires slashed, vandalism.”

But the narrow focus of LGBT politics wasn’t a good fit for her. “I was bored with gay stuff,” she said. “I threw myself just as hard into 10 years of neighborhood activism.” That neighborhood activism led to her becoming president of the Neartown Association in 1995, and in 1997 she won an at-large seat on Houston’s City council, making her the first openly gay individual elected to citywide office in Houston. In 2003, she won her bid to become city controller, the second highest office in city government. But her greatest triumph came in 2009, when she overcame blistering attacks from anti-gay groups to win the race to become Houston’s mayor on December 12, 2009. When she assumed office on January 2, 2010, Houston became the largest U.S. city to have an openly gay mayor.

Alabama Lawmaker Files Bathroom Bill

Sen. Phil Williams

Alabama. Where else? Really, it was only a matter of time. Sen. Phil Williams (R-Rainbow City, ironically) filed a bill requiring anyone that makes restrooms available to the public to do so “in a manner that ensures the privacy of each individual“:

Williams said that can be done in three ways. By having:

•  restroom, bathroom or changing facilities that are designed to be used by one person at a time.

•  restroom, bathroom or changing facilities that are designed to be used by multiple persons of the same biological gender.

•  restroom, bathroom or changing facilities that are designed to be used by multiple persons at once, irrespective of their gender, that are “staffed by an attendant stationed at the door of each restroom to monitor the appropriate use of the restroom and answer any questions or concerns posed by users.”

This comes after the city of Oxford, Alabama had passed its own bathroom ordinance which threatened violators with up to six months in jail. After a national outcry, the Oxford city council rescinded the ordinance a week later.

The Target Trolls Are On the Loose

There’s never been a problem with Target’s bathrooms. People go in, they do what they need to do, and then they leave. And so when Target announced that people could go into whichever bathroom was most appropriate for them, all they did was confirm what had already been going on. But the American Family Association and other anti-LGBT groups see it differently, and have announced yet another of their uncountable boycotts. Unlike the others, this one seems to be having one effect: Bible-waving zealots have taken to marching through Target stores screaming, “Are you gonna let the devil rape your children?”

This guy in Colorado Springs took a different approach, while also trying to prove that zealots are not creativity-challenged:

There still have been no reported incidents of a transwoman assaulting anyone in a woman’s bathroom. However, this video of a man stalking a woman at a Florida Target — he’s a man dressed as a man — is making the rounds, as though it was somehow relevant.

Suspect Arrested Over Bangladesh LGBT Activists’ Murders

Police have arrested Shariful Islam Shihab.

Bangladesh has garnered a terrible reputation lately for violent attacks against bloggers, secular writers, professors, leaders of religious minorities, and other activists who dare to challenge the influence of conservative Islam in what had been a secular and relatively multicultural society. Militants have been specifically targeting those whom they accuse of atheism, like Professor Rezaul Karim Siddique who was hacked to death by machete-wielding Islamists as he set out to work one morning at Rajshahi University. He was the fourth professor at that university killed in recent year. (His daughter denies that he was an atheist.) More than two dozen have been killed since 2013, including two foreigners last October.

Two days after Siddique’s murder, Xulhaz Mannan, 35 and editor of the country’s first and only LGBT magazine, and fellow activist and actor, Tanay Mojumdar, were hacked to death on April 25. Mannan, who edited Roopbaan, and Mojumdar were attacked with meat cleavers in Mannan’s apartment by five to seven attackers, according to witnesses.

Xulhaz Mannan (left) and Tanay Mojum (right)

Mannan launched Roopbaan in 2014, and was an employee of the U.S. embassy in Dhaka where he worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). U.S. Ambassador Marcia Bernicat condemned the killing and called on the Bangladesh government “in the strongest terms to apprehend the criminals behind these murders.” An al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility, a claim that was disputed by the government, which instead blamed local Islamist groups.

So far, only one of the two dozen attacks have resulted in an arrest and prosecution since 2013. Mannan’s connections as a cousin of a former Foreign Minister in the governing party may result in a second prosecution. Yesterday, police arrested Shariful Islam Shihab, a member of the the banned Harkat-ul Jihad al Islami and another militant group, Ansarullah Bangla Team. According to police, Shihab confessed to the killing, which was the result of two months of planning. Police say they are reviewing video evidence to try to identify Shihab and other attackers in the crowd.

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