Gay voters back AV, huge drop in Lib Dem support

LGBT community supports AV
Massive drop in Liberal Democrat support
Scottish voters back SNP

A PinkNews.co.uk poll suggests that the UK’s LGBT community will back the alternative vote system in Friday’s referendum.

A total of 2,295 people took part in the self-selecting survey. Of these, 872 people are on a PinkNews.co.uk panel. They are geographically representative of the UK and their voting intentions have been tracked by this website over the last 14 months.

On Thursday, UK voters will decide whether the country’s voting system should be reformed. Some campaigners want to replace the First Past the Post system for electing MPs with the Alternative Vote (AV) system.

Supporters say AV will mean that MPs are elected with the support of more than 50 per cent of the electorate. However, critics say the system is too complicated, may lead to second-choice candidates coming first and will boost extremist parties.

Of the panel of 872 voters, 72 per cent say they will vote yes to AV on Thursday. Twenty per cent said they would vote no and the remainder did not know.

Slightly lower support for AV was found among the respondents who were not part of the panel. Sixty-six per cent said they would back voting reform, while 30 per cent said they would not. Just under four per cent said they did not know.

When given the option of a number of systems, 63.6 per cent of the panel said they would prefer the Single Transferable Vote system. Just under 20 per cent said they wanted the AV+ (Alternative Vote Plus) system, which would ask voters to select a party as well as a candidate.

Seven per cent said they wanted the AV system and nine per cent said they wanted to retain the First Past the Post system.

In the larger sample of those who had not been tracked, more people showed support for the First Past the Post system (23.7 per cent). However, as with the panel results, the majority (54.6 per cent) supported the Single Transferable Vote System.

Respondents were also asked which party they would support if a general election was held tomorrow.

The results showed a massive drop in support for the Liberal Democrats. Last May, a PinkNews.co.uk poll carried out just before the general election found that 57 per cent of our panel would vote for the party. This has now dropped to just 11.8 per cent, behind the Green party.

However, the Conservative party appears to have made gains among the gay community. In the same May 2010 poll, just six per cent of our panel said they would vote Conservative. Today’s poll puts them on 27.4 per cent.

Labour has almost doubled its support among our panel and the self-selecting survey. Forty-per cent of both samples said they would vote for the party.

The Scottish parliament election will also be held on Thursday, along with elections for the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies. English voters outside London will take part in council elections.

Our poll showed that Scottish voters will give their support to the SNP, which has pledged to hold a consultation on the future of marriage for gay couples.

Forty-two per cent of Scottish voters on our panel said they would give the party their vote, compared to 22.3 per cent for Labour and 16.9 per cent for the Liberal Democrats.

In Wales, 39.2 per cent of the panel said they would vote Labour. Plaid Cymru was the choice of 24.1 per cent of respondents, while 19.5 per cent said they would vote Conservative.

For Northern Ireland, 36.7 per cent said they would vote Alliance. The SDLP got 24.3 per cent of the vote and 19.8 per cent said they would vote Sinn Fein.

In the English council elections, Labour led on on 36.7 per cent. The Conservatives followed on 24.5 per cent.

The Green party pushed the Liberal Demcrats into fourth place, with 17.7 per cent of the vote, compared to 10.8 per cent for the latter.

All respondents described themselves as LGBT, queer or questioning. The survey was carried out online between April 30th and May 2nd.

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Gay campaigners say South African lesbian’s murder was ‘hate crime’

A lesbian who was raped and murdered in a South African township last week was clearly attacked because of her sexuality, gay campaigners say.

Noxolo Nogwaza, 24, was found dead in an alley in Kwa-Thema township, South Africa, on Easter Sunday morning. She was a prominent local gay rights activist and a member of the Ekurhuleni Pride Organising Committee, the key LGBT organisation in Kwa-Thema.

Reports said she had been stoned and stabbed with broken glass and there was evidence she had been raped.

Ms Nogwaza was killed in the same town as Eudy Simelane, a lesbian footballer who was raped and murdered in 2008. Her death sparked international concern about so-called ‘corrective rapes’ of lesbians in South Africa.

Human Rights Watch said it was likely Ms Nogwaza was killed because she was gay.

“[Her] death is the latest in a long series of sadistic crimes against lesbians, gay men, and transgender people in South Africa,” said Human Rights Watch researcher Dipika Nath.

“The vicious nature of the assault is a potent reminder that these attacks are premeditated, planned, and often committed with impunity.”

Ms Nogwaza was found dead after an altercation with men in a bar. No witnesses have come forward and no arrests have been made.

Tsakane Police are understood to be awaiting results of a post-mortem examination.

A spokesman from the Ekurhuleni Pride Organising Committee said the death was “definitely” a hate crime and urged police to treat it as one.

He said: “Eudy [Simelane's] case was not recognised as a hate crime against a lesbian and the same is not done in the cases of many other people who have been raped and/or murdered on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity or expression in South Africa.”

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Man arrested over murder of US gay pride activist

Police in Elmira, New York state, have arrested a man in connection with the murder of a local gay rights activist, Clinton ‘Billy’ Lewis, who was also the owner of Club Chill, a local gay bar.

Police say that they responded to reports of gun fire and located Lewis inside his home, which is a few blocks from the gay bar he owned.

Louis M Duffy of Horseheads, New York state, has been charged with second degree murder and held in remand. No details of the motive have been made available to the media.

Lewis helped organise gay pride events in the town.

Comments are suspended for this story due to legal reasons.

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Corrie star slams David Cameron for alleged support of gay kiss ban before 9pm tv watershed

Coronation Street actress Brooke Vincent has slammed prime minister David Cameron over reports that he supports new proposals which could ban same-sex kisses on pre-watershed television.

The government has commissioned an independent review into the regulation of television content and into the future of the 9pm watershed by the chief executive of the Mothers’ Union, Reg Bailey.

Newspaper reports claim that the review could recommend that gay kisses should be banned before the 9pm watershed and that the recommendations have the support of the prime minister.

At present, all four major soap operas; Corrie, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks all have gay or lesbian characters and all have gay couples. Today, Brooke Vincent who plays teenage lesbian Sophie Webster in Coronation Street took to Twitter to criticise the prime minister: “I swear David Cameron’s meant to be supporting equal rights,” she Tweeted. “I just think if same-sex kisses are what he is prioritising and concentrating on changing, our country’s in trouble.”

A source close to the inquiry told the Daily Mail: “It is hard to protect children in the internet and mobile-phone age but we have to do something. For some parents, what has been considered acceptable in the past – such as that Brookside kiss – is not appropriate for children to see early in the evening.”

It’s also be suggested that raunchy dance routines such as those by Christina Aguilera and Rihanna on last year’s X Factor final could also fall foul of the new rules.

A Downing Street source told PinkNews.co.uk that contrary to the reports in the newspapers, the prime minister has yet to express a view on the report, and will not until it is published.

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Cica Zhou Weitong - Chinese Top Model

Cica Zhou Weitong is a famous model from China. Rarely we've seen Chinese actress in this blog, and if we recalled it right, Cica Zhou is only the second one after Bai Ling. That's not because we don't like girls from the Eastern Asian country, it's just that they rarely appear sexy, especially in lingerie.

Anyway, Cica Zhou aka. Zhou Weitong is like an anomaly in Chinese entertainment world. Not only because of her bravery of doing provocative poses, but also because of her physical built. Mostly, Chinese girls are flat-chested, but Cica Zhou's boobs are big-sized with perfect shape. They're rumored as a result of breast implant, but it's never confirmed though.

The 28-year-old Cica Zhou Weitong also has a unique nickname. Fans in mainland China are calling her as "Little Lin Chi-Ling". Lin Chi-Ling is a senior Taiwanese actress who's 8 years older than Cica. Well, in term of experience, Cica Zhou might be the lesser one, but if we check the breast department, she should be nicknamed as the "Big Lin Chi-Ling".

Enjoy these pics of Cica Zhou Weitong in sexy lingerie, and we will be back soon with her biography.

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VIRGINIA: King & Spalding Fired By AG Ken Cuccinelli For DOMA "Weakness"

Notoriously anti-gay Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has fired the Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding for backing out of the DOMA cases.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has ended his office’s relationship with the law firm that earlier this week said it would not represent the House of Representatives in its case supporting the Defense of Marriage Act. In a letter to Atlanta-based King & Spalding, the state’s top law enforcement official, a Republican, says that the firm’s willingness to drop the House as a client in the DOMA case “was such an obsequious act of weakness” that he sees the need to terminate Virginia’s ties with the firm.

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Gays Caused The Mortgage Crisis

"Just as a child is far less likely to suffer abuse in the home of his/her married, heterosexual parents, so the opposite is true. Where the structure is sin-based, other sins are more likely to scurry in through the cracks. Substance abuse and self-destruction accompany sexual deviance. And some of this means poor decisions about finances.

"The mortgage crisis was the sin of temptation being offered by those who relaxed legitimate standards, offered to those without the personal standards to resist. This easy-pay physical structure was too good to be true, and appealed to an increasingly covetous segment of our culture. Sexual and material covetousness are usually sin siblings. It would be interesting to study the families who have defaulted on mortgages for the correlations between structural and/or functional weaknesses like infidelity, divorce, gambling or porn addictions, job instability, credit card default, domestic abuse, sexual deviance, and criminality. There is also a high likelihood that poor or no church attendance would show up as a factor as well." - Linda Harvey, head of the SPLC-certified hate group, Mission America.

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