Northern Ireland sports minister denounces Belfast's first gay rugby team

DUBLIN, Ireland _ A Northern Ireland government minister denounced the province's first gay rugby team Tuesday as guilty of discrimination _ a charge that the team denied.

The Ulster Titans Rugby Football Club, founded last year, specifically welcomes gay rugby players. Sports Minister Edwin Poots, an evangelical Protestant in the Northern Ireland government, accused the team of being bigoted against heterosexuals.

"I just cannot fathom why people see the necessity to develop an apartheid in sport,'' Poots told the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast.

"It would be unacceptable to produce an all-black rugby team or an all-white team or an all-Chinese team. To me it's equally unacceptable to produce an all-homosexual rugby team,'' Poots said. "I find it remarkable that people who talk so much about inclusivity and about having an equal role in society would then go down the route of exclusion.''

Ulster Titans officials said they were flabbergasted by Poots' attack. They said a few of the squad's 25 players are heterosexuals, and the team welcomed players of all backgrounds.

"When the club was set up it welcomed members regardless of their age, creed, religion, sexual orientation or whatever, and that's how it continues,'' said Declan Lavery, a co-founder of the team, who owns a gay bar in Belfast.

"Yes, it was primarily something established as a vehicle for gay people, but that doesn't mean somebody who isn't gay can't join. Everyone is welcome,'' he said.

The Titans are the first gay rugby team in Northern Ireland, the most religiously conservative corner of the United Kingdom. Gay rugby teams are well established in Britain, while the Republic of Ireland in 2003 got its first primarily gay rugby team, the Emerald Warriors.

Poots' political party, the Democratic Unionists, was founded by Protestant evangelist Ian Paisley, who today leads the Northern Ireland government. In 1977, Paisley led a campaign called Save Ulster From Sodomy that sought to keep homosexual acts outlawed in Northern Ireland. However, a European Court of Human Rights ruling forced Britain to decriminalize homosexuality in Northern Ireland in 1982.