New Zealand’s first same-sex weddings took place in early May after a comprehensive civil-union law came into force.

In Wellington, civil-union “poster boys” John Jolliff, 75, and Des Smith, 65, tied the knot in the city council chambers May 1 before 200 of their friends and family members after arriving in a silver Rolls-Royce and being welcomed by an honor guard carrying 17 huge rainbow flags, The Dominion Post reported.

Mayor Kerry Prendergast conducted the ceremony, pronouncing the couple “civilized.”

“Not many of us would have thought this was possible,” Prendergast said.

After the ceremony, a brass band led the wedding party through Civic Square to a reception at the historic Boatshed building.

Other weddings took place in Auckland and Christchurch, reports said.

Amnesty International on April 27 expressed support for 35 men jailed and sentenced to flogging in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, for the crime of attending a “gay wedding party.”

The 35 are among about 105 men who were jailed and sentenced to beatings for alleged homosexual conduct in conjunction with the March 10 party.

Thirty-one of the men were sentenced to from six months to one year in prison and to 200 lashes each. Four were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and 2,000 lashes. About 70 other men were released, reportedly because they had influential connections, but they later were called back to a police station and informed that they, too, had been sentenced to a year in jail.

“The men may be prisoners of conscience, punished solely for their sexual orientation,” Amnesty said.

The organization asked its supporters to write to Saudi officials demanding that the sentences be commuted, that the nation stop punishing people solely for being gay, and that the exact charges against the men be made known.

Amnesty said writers also should point out that flogging is “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment amounting to torture, contrary to Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

For more information, visit World News online at www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to the Amnesty International Web site.

The Vatican May 2 urged Catholics in Spain, including government employees, to resist the nation’s recently approved legislation allowing same-sex marriage and gay adoption.

“Christians, even if they are state employees, are asked to become conscientious objectors because the laws we are speaking of are deeply offensive to morality,” said Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family.

He said Spain’s same-sex marriage bill “falsified the very definition of marriage” while the bill allowing same-sex couples to adopt “destroys the future of children [and] they suffer moral violence.”

“When they are able to think for themselves, when they grow up, what a tragedy when they have to say, ‘My parents are two men, or two women,’”

López Trujillo told the Vatican’s Fides news agency. “Their personality, their stability is put at risk.”

Leaders of Scotland’s Parliament have prohibited religious officials from addressing the body if they are going to attack gays or other minorities, the Sunday Herald reported May 1.

The move follows an address by Catholic Cardinal Keith O’Brien in which he called gays “captives to sexual aberration.”

The United Kingdom’s Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association commented, “It’s great to find politicians prepared to stand up to religious homophobia of this sort and take practical steps to curb it.”

Chile’s Chamber of Deputies passed a measure May 2 aimed at helping gays and transgender people.

The resolution was drafted by the Homosexual Integration and Liberation Movement.

It urges the government to pass an antidiscrimination law, urges the government to file legal complaints against people who commit anti-gay crimes, urges the Carabineros – the national police – and Civil Police to exercise particular diligence and rigor in preventing and investigating anti-gay crimes, and urges courts to apply maximum rigor in handing down penalties for such crimes.

The Jerusalem WorldPride 2005 march and festivities scheduled for mid-August have been postponed.

Organizers said police would have been unable to provide security for the events because the festivities were set to take place just after the planned evacuation of Jews from Gaza.

“The homo-lesbian community in Israel is not oblivious to what is going on in the country and to the major public event that the Gaza pullout will be,” said activist Hagai El-Ad.

In late March, a dozen Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders held a press conference in Jerusalem to denounce WorldPride as a “severe affront to the hearts and souls of adherents of all religions.” They demanded that the government and police “prohibit any march of this kind.”

There was no immediate word on a new date for the events.

The last WorldPride was in Rome in 2000. The celebration is licensed by InterPride, the International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Coordinators.

For the first time, an openly gay Conservative was elected to the United Kingdom Parliament May 5.

Nick Herbert, 42, will represent Arundel and South Downs, an affluent rural constituency near Brighton.

He received 49.8 percent of the vote in a field of five candidates. His closest opponent, a Liberal Democrat, got 27.1 percent.

Herbert also is director of the right-wing think tank Reform.

Another Conservative gay MP, Alan Duncan, came out only after being elected.