Current mood:

bitterly resigned

Whenever I Hear About You Guys Talking About Gay Marriage, I'm Reminded Of Shit Like This.

I suppose this is a reminder of how far the LGBT community in the West has come.

Meet Thio Li-Ann. She’s a Singaporean professor of Law at the National University of Singapore, and is a Nominated Member of Parliament.

NMPs (there are up to six of ‘em) get to vote, but only on not-dangerous shit, like stuff that doesn’t involve changing the constitution, public funds, or removing from power those who nominated them to power. But srsly, Singapore is so fucking advanced it doesn’t really need democracy. They’re like the Next Generation of Socialist Robot Utopia, except not really.

For a bit more background, Section 377A of the Penal Code of Singapore is the main remaining law in Singapore that criminalizes “gross indecencies” committed between men.

Now see what Professor Thio says to defend 377A.

The ‘liberal’ camp wants 377A repealed. They offer an ‘argument from consent’ –government should not police the private sexual behaviour of consenting adults. They opine this violates their liberty or ‘privacy’. They ask, ‘Why criminalize something which does not “harm” anyone; if homosexuals are “born that way”, isn’t it unkind to ‘discriminate’ against their sexual practices?

These flawed arguments are marinated with distracting fallacies which obscure what is at stake – repealing 377A is the first step of a radical, political agenda which will subvert social morality, the common good and undermine our liberties.

I’ll tell you this: I could not get past this paragraph before my brain started shutting down (pre-labelling the opposition’s argument always seems to engage my brain’s spam filter, much in the same way 419 scam emails engages your mailbox's). And it is a long speech. It is heavy going.

So let me post some point-to-point rebuttals made by members of the Singaporean Internet.

You think this is bad, though? At the very least she’s Singaporean. At least in Singapore there’s a rather thin veneer of intellectual respectability that gives Our Friendly Neighbors the ability to sneer at their brutish uncivilized cousins across the Tebrau Strait.