WHO'S AFRAID OF THE GAY MAN?

This morning, I flipped the Straitjacket Times to page 24 to find this taunt in boldface: “Decriminalizing homosexuality would be an error”. My eyes widened and I wondered which retard passing herself off as an academic was once again yodeling their morality on higher ground, and my blood-thirsty instincts were further fuelled when I realized Yvonne C.L. Lee was an assistant professor of law at the local university. Law professors, particularly the kind with fundamentalist Christian leanings make the most asinine arguments while cloaking them under the intellectual superiority of the law and their profession. It’s time to go for blood.

Lee essentially sounded no different fromthe rest of the moral panickers who fear the day that sex between two consenting adult males would be legal. She had only two new approaches to opposing this scenario, and that was

1) Human rights equality is not an absolute value, and the “public good” takes precedence over individuals’ equality and still must be protected by the law against “the rights of the individual or groups”.

She goes on to repeat a stale and seriously tiresome argument that decriminalizing homosexuality will result in “harmful social consequences”. To render her argument more credible, she went to great effort to imagine a hypothetical nightmare of possibilities that might come in the wake of this action, every single one of which I will destroy.

2) Homosexuality is “repugnant” and “offensive to the majority of citizens”. That’s it! I was speechless. One of her brilliant arguments was that the gay rights movement have been impeding the “free speech” of religious bigots – oops, I meant Christian and Muslim pastors who preach to thousands of people from their pulpits that there are people amongst us Singaporeans who are sinners, and morally repugnant, simply because they are only attracted to others of the same sex.

Basically, her own personal opinion – no doubt informed by a very flawed and shitty book that is deemed to be the literal word of God – is a good enough premise to generalize to most of the population, that ‘homosexuality is “offensive” because I and a lot of other religious zealots think so’. So there. She goes on to assert that one of the nightmare repercussions for our “public good” is the breeding of social divisiveness!

Somebody, please do something about university graduates who inflict this kind of stupidity on those who read the newspaper on a day they have 3 chapters of a Masters thesis to edit. I could not sit by and do nothing. This lunatic is only one of THOUSANDS of other lunatics out there who really BELIEVE they are right. Not by any kind of logic based on humanistic goals or a universal compassion and preference for broad, inclusive social justice. No, they invoke a most dangerous kind of rationality: reason based on (1) the word of some people masquerading as messengers from a higher being and
(2) an overactive imagination.

Let me demolish Lee’s “rational” arguments one by one:

(i) A harmful social consequence is the threat to “public health” because Lee argues that it has been “proven” that sodomy “an inherently unhealthy act that carries higher risks of a number of sexually transmitted infections”. The law thereby “should not facilitate acts which threaten public health”.

Firstly, sexually transmitted infections are not MORE commonly caused by anal sex than vaginal-penile penetration. In fact if Lee would check her facts, public health statistics would show that the highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases and infections occurred in heterosexuals. If the law against sodomy should remain because the act itself carries risk to health, then by all means, put a ban on ANY SEXUAL INTERCOURSE, because it isn’t abstinence from sexual acts that pose health risks, a medically trained professional will tell you it is a person’s prudent and safe sexual HABITS that protect him against infection.

(ii) Lee believes that letting this one go to the gay camp would support the extension of their agenda to “transform social morality”. She gives a whole list of POSSIBLE realities that the law must accommodate:

a) mandating the age of legal consent. Lee says that in Western nations, this ranges from 13 to 18, she then cleverly (or stupidly, depending on how you like your logic served up) gives us the imagery that this covers “Singapore males from Sec 1 to junior college”.

What’s the point? Is Lee saying that there is something morally reprehensible in allowing 13 year old boys and junior college boys to fuck one another? Or is she implying that there is something UNNATURAL and WRONG about them having anal sex? Either way, this is a no-brainer, because 10 year olds are having sex now. Yes, the law hasn’t caught up with heterosexual sexual patterns of our young, so why is she getting hot and bothered with the age at which young boys should be allowed to have anal sex?

b) Lee thinks that the gay rights camp would move to get their alternative lifestyle “mainstreamed” in the media, arts, education. Basically, she is panicking over the possibility that homosexuality would gain the right to be publicly accepted on our TVs. She thinks that it is “problematic” to NOT discriminate a person’s sexual orientation.

One: what a fucking fascist.
Two: she says that “sexual orientation” is vague and includes “bestiality and paedophilia”. Excuse me, paedophilia poses a THREAT to society because it harms the most defenceless of its members – children. Bestiality probably infringes the rights of the animal, but I don’t suppose Lee or the right wing religionists really care. Sexual orientation MUST NOT be a basis for discriminating individuals, and let us please note the difference between ORIENTATION and DEPRAVITY. Sodomy harms nobody when it is consensual, but it certainly harms the woman being RAPED.

Can someone please fire this clown? I am getting tired, and I am not even into her 3rd argument, which is a winner:

c) “An active homosexual agenda has engendered clashes with fundamental liberties like free speech and religious liberty”. She goes on to describe luridly how religious pastors have been sanctioned by the law for inciting “hate” in their preaching that homosexuality is a sin and repugnant and immoral. This opinion includes non-religious people, she adds.

I love this one. Ms Lee is saying that making PUBLIC speeches on hatred and denouncement of homosexuals is okay, because this is “free speech”. In fact, having laws against this kind of behaviour and speech is “intolerance” and will “breed social divisiveness”.
HELLO?
Somebody please, please do something about the stupidity of our law lecturers. I fear for my children’s future in multiracial, SECULAR Singapore.

Ms Lee, you think that publicly denouncing homosexuals and homosexuality as “repugnant”, “morally wrong and unnatural” as well as a “sin” is merely a matter of free speech while homosexuals are NOT FREE TO ASK for societal acceptance that they are simply “different” and not criminal? That it is not within their rights to talk about their differences on stage, in song and performance? Do they incite their own community to denounce and despise heterosexuals? Muslims? Christians? My dear Ms Lee, what you are saying is already intolerant to a great number of people, offensive even, and is as we speak, breeding divisiveness amongst Singaporeans.

d) Lee says there is a threat in homosexuals seeking “societal approval”. She says that the comparison between decriminalizing adultery and that of homosexuality is “fallacious”. That argument in support of decriminalization asserts that adultery has not gained social acceptance despite being decriminalized, and hence, widespread social mores against homosexuality would not be affected by a similar action.

I don’t follow.
Ms Lee criticizes the “fallacy” of the analogy by saying that adulterers do not ask for social approval, unlike gays. Therefore gays should still be criminal. Excuse me? Adultery is a direct threat to the institution of marriage, adulterers ARE MARRIED. Why would married adulterers threaten their own marriage? In fact many gay men choose to get married, simply because they are too afraid to be openly gay, because of this same lack of social acceptance of their choice. If you do your research, many married men trough the Internet for sex with other married men. Hello? Societal acceptance of homosexuality is going to SAVE MORE MARRIAGES and reduce the rate of HIV infection of innocent, unsuspecting women than acceptance adultery ever will.

I’m getting really tired. This person is more stupid than I thought.
The “homosexual rights agenda” and the hypothetical moral mayhem it potentially spells for us is what Ms Lee is opposing, not the ethics behind decriminalizing homosexuality and the logic of human rights and equality. By equality, I mean respect rather than discrimination, not a flat-out universalist contention. Lee has simply repeated all the stupid arguments stemming from blind and intolerant beliefs that curtail the rights of homosexuals to exist and behave in a responsible manner. How? By a pathetic demonizing of people and extending pricelessly flawed reasoning to the larger concept of the “public good”.

Is this the future envisioned by fascist bigots? If so, please, save the Supreme Court from all religious fundamentalists who think they have rationality on their side. In their fear of toppling off their moral high horses, I am afraid they have lost the script.