The story centred on the fact that the National Volunteer and Philanthropic Centre (NVPC), had given S$100,000 to a company called Liberty League Pte Ltd, for its activities. The NVPC comes under the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports. Under the grant, Liberty League will be "conduct[ing] sexuality talks in schools."

It thus appears that the intention is to convert impressionable teenagers to its point of view.

"Currently, 70 percent of those it works with fall into this category."

CNA's reporter, Pearl Forss, asked somewhat rhetorically, "Does it mean that Liberty League champions gay and lesbian rights?"

Leslie Lung, the owner of Liberty League Pte Ltd (with $10 in paid-up capital, but now $100,000 in free money), replied, "We champion human rights really. It's about people being able to say, I'm human and sexual orientation is so wide. Being gay and lesbian is part of it; coming out of it is part of it as well."

Reporter Forss took that answer to be a Yes. She then thought out loud, "In a conservative society like Singapore, the league's work can be expected to be controversial."

The work will certainly be controversial, but it won't be the "conservatives" who'd be riled. Forss read the situation wrongly.

The NVPC has a scheme for distributing grants to help kick-start community welfare initiatives. Eligibility criteria include:

• Meet community needs
• Be new, significantly different from anything offered by other parties
• Secular. Non-profit.

Let's take each criterion in turn:

The maximum grant available is $100,000 and no recipient can receive a second grant.

Clearly then, NVPC must have thought that Liberty League's proposal must have been so compelling that they deserved the highest amount possible.

By comparison, another non-governmental organisation, Transit Workers Count Too (TWC2), got a $50,000 grant in mid 2005. This suggests that its mission is less important than Liberty League's. TWC2 works to improve the welfare of foreign workers and domestic maids in Singapore, some of whom suffer exploitation and abuse from employers, or have to work under unsafe conditions, or find their wages delayed.

So the first question that arises, in relation to the NVPC's own criteria, is why does the government think that Liberty League's program meets community needs to such an impressive degree? Has there been an outcry in the media that teenagers' sexual needs have been neglected much more than the welfare and treatment of foreign workers?

Even if there is a need to deal with sexuality issues among teenagers, is Liberty League's program an appropriate way to deal with it? Do professional psychologists endorse the approach that Liberty League adopts?

As you will see below in the discussion below about pseudo-therapies to turn people straight, it has no support whatsoever from leading professional associations. The World Health Organisation, for example, does not list homosexuality as a disorder, which means it does not justify intervention [1].

So even if the problem is real, does Liberty League's discredited approach "meet community needs" as required by NVPC's own eligibility rules?

 
The idea must be new

Singapore parents feel uncomfortable talking about sex to their children, leaving them to discover this subject for themselves (quite successfully, I dare say). So, sometime in the mid 1990s, the Ministry of Education added sex education to the curriculum in a small way, but ever since then, school principals and teachers have faced a great dilemma. Being (mostly) Singaporeans too, they are as uncomfortable talking about sex as the mute parents.

That being the case, there has been a regular drip drip of anecdotal reports over the last 10 years or so that schools, to alleviate their embarrassment, outsource the sexuality programs to external groups.

Choices is the main provider of such outsourced services. I mentioned this in the article Head of camel, rump of ape, written in 2001. Choices is a group initiated by the Church of our Saviour in the 1990s or even earlier, and given Choices' mission -- to abjure homosexuality in order to be a better Christian -- you can imagine the message that is propagated.

You would ask -- and it's a pertinent question -- why does our government endorse a proselytising organisation to teach sexuality to non-Christian children who make up the great majority of our schoolchildren? But that is another issue I'll leave for another discussion.

More topical may be the question of whether Choices' avowed aim of getting gays and lesbians to turn straight is helpful or detrimental to our children's psychological welfare, which surely must be the overarching concern of the Ministry of Education, but this I shall leave aside for now.

What I do wish to point out is that subcontractors going to schools giving talks on sexuality is nothing new. Yet, CNA reported that "Liberty League says it is the first community service group of its kind in Singapore." Since Liberty League was only incorporated on 16 December 2004, is that claim valid?

Even Leslie Lung himself is apparently not new to the circuit; he too had done such school talks previously. An 18-year-old girl -- let's call her Rachel -- wrote a first-hand report for People Like Us [2]. In it she said,

He came to our school to talk about homosexuality, along with another "ex-lesbian".

So the question is why does NVPC consider Liberty League's project "new, and significantly different from anything offered by other parties" –- to quote the criterion from NVPC's own website?

 
The mission must be secular

The teenager had a lot more to say. Here are some excerpts, which gives you an insight into what the talk consisted of :

... had to sit through a one-hour treatise on why homosexuality was wrong, and if we had any same-sex attractions, we should immediately seek help and "turn straight". He made several references to God and the Bible during the talk, and so did the "ex-lesbian"..... Both of them talked about how going to the CHURCH had led them through the "straight" path.

Further on,

I was immensely offended by the whole thing, as I thought it was pretty insensitive to everyone non-Christian, and more pointedly, everyone gay in the audience.

Further on,

Furthermore, Leslie was violating medical standards: Homosexuality has long been declassified as a mental disorder, but he repeatedly said it was. Was he a psychologist to make this judgement?

 
Evidently, it is quite impossible for Leslie Lung to speak of sexuality without bringing in his faith. More than that, he can't do it without bringing in the hateful prejudices associated with his interpretation of Christianity. He is stuck in his groove to such an extent that, as the girl noted, he would dispute a professional opinion when he has no credentials to do so.

It's as if someone who is not a dietician came to nutrition class to tell all the school students they must never ever eat vegetables, and that other, qualified, nutritionists who stress the importance of greens are plain wrong. Do we allow that kind of thing in our school curriculum?

That Liberty League has a Christian and anti-gay agenda is also obvious from many other indicators.

It's own website promotes a book by Leslie Lung, Freedom of Choice, in which almost all the subject persons mentioned in its various chapters came from Choices. Every story there basically features how a subject was "delivered" (I use this word in an ironic way) from some sexual "malady", most notably homosexuality.

Liberty League's website uses terms like "sexual brokenness", "addiction" and "abuse", all to create an impression that anything other than monogamous heterosexuality is pathological.

Liberty league and its book Freedom of Choice is strongly featured in the website of Exodus Singapore [3]. Exodus too speaks of "sexual brokenness" and "God's plan for sexuality". On its Policy page, it describes "homosexual tendencies as one of many disorders that beset fallen humanity. Christ offers a healing alternative to those with sexual and relational problems."

Exodus Singapore is, via Exodus Asia-Pacific, linked to the US organisation of the same name that pushes pseudo-therapies for turning people straight. The fact that these pseudo-therapies have never been shown objectively to work -- in fact, in one study of 202 individuals by Shidlo and Schroeder, 78 percent of respondents experienced long-term psychological distress as a result of such misguided attempts -- has not deterred them from their beliefs. The fact that no major psychological pr psychiatric association supports such programs does not seem to dent Exodus' enthusiasm for them.

What such determination itself proves is that such ideas are founded upon religious belief. They can't be founded upon science, after all, when the objective evidence points the other way. The logical conclusion then is that any group, such as Liberty League, that promotes such pseudo-therapies are out to spread their religion-based ideas.

The article Ex-gay ministries and the cures that don't work discusses this subject in greater detail.

On 13 October 2005, at a seminar organised by the Graduates Christian Fellowship on how homosexuality was a psychological problem, Liberty League was touted as resource for counseling. It was recommended by Tan Thuan Seng, the President of Focus on the Family, Singapore (FOTF-Sg). Tan is no stranger to the anti-gay talk circuit.

While FOTF-Sg always tries to present itself to the local media as a "homegrown" outfit, one has to be blind three times over not to see that it is an affiliate of Christian- and US-based Focus on the Family (www.family.org). The US organisation's website clearly includes FOTF-Sg under its "Focus International" listing.

The anti-gay, Christian-infused stance of Focus on the Family is well known.

Now why would Exodus Singapore and FOTF-Sg tout Liberty League and its book? It doesn't take a genius to understand that they share similar goals and reinforce each other's message.

Thus, despite Liberty League avoiding any reference to Christianity on its own website, its recommendation by these other, very Christian, organisations, its espousal of similar ex-gay objectives, and not least, Leslie Lung's own words when speaking at the Rachel's school prove conclusively that it has a religious agenda.

NVPC's criteria for grant eligibility include the stipulation that programs must be secular.

Perhaps NVPC thinks that the specific program it is funding is non-sectarian even if Liberty League and its book are not. There are two insurmountable arguments against such naïveté: Rachel's own first-hand testimony and the common sense that leopards can't change their spots.

* * * * *

A few people, some straight, have remarked to me how hard it is to believe that NVPC could not have known what outsiders like us could discover in one afternoon of web search.

Could these bureaucrats be so negligent to have failed to do any background checks before handing out $100,000?

But if they weren't negligent, i.e. if they indeed had dutifully done their background checks, then one is left with no other conclusion but that the NVPC knew very well what Liberty League was about; what its true aims were despite the deliberately non-Christian language and deliberately vague terms it uses.

Yet the NVPC approved the grant, and signed off on the maximum amount it could disburse. Why? 

© Yawning Bread