President Tabaré Vázquez signed a bill Dec. 27 making Uruguay the first Latin American country to grant same-sex couples access to civil unions on the national level.

The legislation, which passed the Senate in September and the House of Representatives in November, took effect Jan. 1.

Couples must live together for five years before they can take advantage of the law, which grants spousal rights in areas that include inheritance, property ownership, pensions, parenting and health care.

The law applies to “two people – whatever their sex, identity, orientation or sexual option may be – who maintain an emotional relationship of a sexual nature [and] an exclusive, singular, stable and permanent character without being united in matrimony.”

Other Latin American localities with civil-union laws include the city of Buenos Aires, the Argentine province of Río Negro, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, Mexico City, and the Mexican state of Coahuila, which borders Texas.

Nepal’s Supreme Court on Dec. 21 ordered the government to pass new laws and rewrite old ones to extend equal rights and anti-discrimination protections to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersex people.

The ruling came in a public-interest case filed by four gay organizations.

Current Nepalese law prohibits “unnatural” sex under penalty of up to two years in prison.

“Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex are natural persons irrespective of their masculine and feminine gender and they have the right to exercise their rights and live an independent life in society,” the court said.

The court also ordered the government to form a committee to study same-sex marriage in other nations with a view to changing Nepalese law in that area, as well.

Bolivia is set to become the sixth nation to ban anti-gay discrimination in its constitution.

Article 14 of the finalized text of the planned new constitution states:

“The State prohibits and punishes any form of discrimination based on sex, color, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, origin, culture, nationality, citizenship, language, religious creed, ideology, political affiliation or philosophical beliefs, marital status, economic or social status, type of occupation, level of education, disability, pregnancy, or other factors that have the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of the rights of everyone.”

Once ratified, the constitution will become the first in the world to protect transgender people.

The other nations that protect gays constitutionally are Canada, Ecuador, Fiji, South Africa and Switzerland. Sweden’s constitution, in a section on press freedom, prohibits agitation and threats against gay people as a group.

Two Havana lesbians were symbolically married Dec. 23 in the courtyard of the state National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), Inter Press Service reported.

Mónica, 19, and Elizabeth, 28, tied the knot before 60 friends and supporters in the first-ever same-sex union to receive support from a government agency.

The ceremony was filmed by students from the Cuban Higher Institute of Art.

“We are trying to raise awareness of this issue based on that which makes us most human, our feelings – in this case love,” the director of the film, Hanny Marín, told IPS.

CENESEX is pushing legislation to create legal same-sex civil unions, and the measure could see parliamentary action this year. The agency and the Federation of Cuban Women submitted the bill to the Political Bureau of the Communist Party Central Committee in June.

IPS said the Communist Party has instructed CENESEX to “prepare” the public for gay civil unions via a media campaign, but agency director Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of acting President Raúl Castro, has acknowledged that the bill faces “a great deal of resistance.”

It would extend spousal rights in areas such as inheritance, housing and adoption.

The Roman Catholic vicar general of Havana, Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes García-Menocal, supports “stable same-sex relationships” being “protected by civil laws,” he said in the July/August 2007 issue of the archdiocese’s magazine.

“Contemporary Western society is no longer the same as that which arrived at present clarifications concerning marriage,” Céspedes wrote.

Although the church “is not going to renounce criteria established by revelation and set by tradition,” he said, “neither can it ignore contemporary personal and family reality.”

Eighty percent of Bulgarians have a negative or extremely negative attitude toward gays, according to a Skala poll published Dec. 20.

Seventy percent would prevent their child from attending a school with an openly gay teacher, half don’t want to work with a known homosexual and only 17 percent said they feel they could communicate freely with a gay person.

About half also said they could not accept it if one of their children were gay.

The study found that negative attitudes are strongest toward cross-dressers and weakest toward lesbians.

The government of Spain’s Galicia region is investigating Protestant minister Marcos Zapata for running a seminar called “How to Raise Heterosexual Children,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Dec. 28.

The paper said that at one recent event, Zapata called homosexuality an illness that can be cured via family therapy, said he promotes masculinity in his own family by making his sons watch professional wrestling, and urged attendees to “hug your sons as much as you can, because if you don’t, perhaps another man will.”

A government spokesman suggested it is illegal to proselytize minors with “homophobic attitudes.”

The head of the National Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals, Toni Poveda, said his group also will pursue legal action against Zapata.

Assistance: Bill Kelley.