Gilead gouging, the acceptance gap and lesbian farmers

Your Daily Package of newsy and naughty bits from around the world


American right panics over lesbian farmers

After the US Department of Agriculture hosted a summit on rural LGBT people, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh decided the White House was trying to inundate rural America with lesbian farmers. Panic ensued, and you can now buy an “America Needs Lesbian Farmers” T-shirt.

Gilead Australia accused of price gouging

Australian HIV advocates and health officials say that Gilead, the makers of the PrEP drug Truvada, tried to protect their exorbitant profit margins on the drug at the expense of gay Australians. Activists say Gilead applied to restrict subsidized access to the drug, so that it could continue to charge most users over $700 a month.

Read more at BuzzFeed.

Australian parliament showdown over plebiscite

The Australian Labour and Liberal parties are locked into a game of parliamentary chicken over a proposed plebiscite on same-sex marriage. Labour says the plebiscite is just an expensive delaying tactic, and has threatened to shoot it down in parliament. The ruling Liberals say doing so might delay an equal marriage vote by three years.

Read more at the Guardian.

Study: Three world regions lag in gay acceptance

A sociologist at Ohio State University who looked at changes in acceptance of gay people over time has found that the world is surging forward with the exception of three regions: the Muslim world, the former Soviet-Union and Sub-Saharan Africa. Worryingly, the study also shows a widening gap in gay acceptance between world regions.

Read more at LiveScience.

New anti-gay study falls flat

After the socially conservative sociological journal The New Atlantis published a paper arguing that homosexuality can be changed and transgender children don’t exist, the internet helpfully piled on to demonstrate what the researchers got wrong and left out.

 

Niko Bell

Niko Bell is a writer, editor and translator from Vancouver. He writes about sexual health, science, food and language.

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