It was with great sadness that I read your recent comment, made to Channel News Asia in your capacity as a member of the GPC [1] for Home Affairs and Law, justifying your committee’s recommendation to decriminalize heterosexual anal and oral sex, but to continue to criminalize these for homosexual persons.

As a gay man, I’ve lived under the shadow of society’s opprobrium for a good part of my thirty-one years. I think it’d be fair to say that most gay men and lesbian women in Singapore are affected in a similar way -– that they live lives shaded by a certain degree of fear and uncertainty, about how they would be perceived by their family, friends, colleagues and superiors were knowledge of their sexuality to be made public. Such a social stigma is in no small way generated and perpetuated by the clauses in Section 377 that criminalize homosexual sex.

Your comment, that "It's not necessarily for major legislative change to signal changes. But the legislation will only be changed when there is sufficient justification to warrant it, because the larger section of society think that it's time for those changes to take place" strikes me, therefore, as unconscionable and flawed, when what is at stake is a significant amount of human pain. Section 377 doesn’t just stand on its own -– the point isn’t whether Section 377 has been recently invoked to prosecute gay men; rather, Section 377 is problematic because it serves as the foundation and justification for a whole plethora of discriminatory policies -– from the Ministry of Education’s homophobic sexuality education curriculum, to the witch hunts that the Singapore Armed Forces institutes against its own gay officers, to the media ban on positive depictions of gay people. As a trained lawyer, I’m sure you can appreciate the circularity of the whole issue -– the "larger section of society" will never change their minds about gay people (and the need to rework or undo Section 377) if they are constantly conditioned to perceive gay people in the most negative of ways -– by schools, the news media, and other institutions. Section 377 effectively locks our society into a vicious cycle of intolerance and homophobia.

In an ideal world, good governance would entail defending the rights of minorities against the prejudices of the majority, and working to reduce, rather than entrench those prejudices. As a key example of this, consider how the Brown vs Board of Education decision (1954) ran counter to prevailing social opinions and instincts in America at the time, that the races should be segregated.

It’s easy to think, on hindsight, that the U.S. Supreme Court made the right decision. But it wasn’t an easy decision to make then, given the weight of social opinion against it. It’s a challenge which has been expressed by various thinkers over the ages, including the Buddha, Gandhi, and Javier Perez de Cuellar, that a society is judged not so much by the standards attained by its more affluent and privileged members as by the quality of life which it is able to assure for its weakest members. It’s a challenge for a government to do the right thing, rather than take the politically expedient course of action.

I thus strongly urge the GPC to reconsider its proposal to entrench the exclusion of gay and lesbian Singaporeans from full participation in the life of their country.

Yours respectfully,