It’s no longer slander to call someone gay

A court says it’s no longer slander in New York to falsely call someone gay.

A mid-level appeals court on Thursday wiped out decades of rulings, including its own, to say that society no longer treats false comments that someone is gay, lesbian or bisexual as defamation. Without defamation, there is no longer slander, the court ruled.

While the decision by the Appellate Division’s Third Department sets new case law in New York now, it could still go to a definitive ruling by the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.

The New York decision finds that the comment is now “based on a false premise that it is shameful and disgraceful to be described as lesbian, gay or bisexual.”

The Army dropped SEATTLE — a murder charge, but added others, including steroid use, against a soldier accused in a deadly shooting rampage in Afghanistan, his lawyer said Friday.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is now accused of gunning down 16 civilians in a predawn raid on two Afghan villages in March.

Due to discrepancies in the names on lists of the victims, officials had apparently counted one of them twice, but are now certain there were 16 killed, said Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield, a spokesman for Joint Base Lewis- McChord south of Seattle, where Bales is based.

His attorney, Emma Scanlan, said there was nothing surprising in the new charges, which also accuse the Norwood, Ohio, native of assaulting an unidentified Afghan male with his hands and knees the month before the shooting.

“We’re looking forward to putting on a defense and seeing what they can prove,” she said. The Army dropped off 5,000 pages of discovery materials at the defense team’s office on Friday,