So, should people of faith be allowed to use religious justifications for their views and influence others accordingly? For example, can the argument to keep homosexual acts a crime be based on religion?

Prescribing this would be foolish in a multi-faith society with people who adhere to different religious teachings.

Those who want to advance public discussion must make use of public reason, and put up public justifications for what they believe in.

In other words, religion may influence your view on an issue. But when arguing your case in the political arena, you need to present arguments understandable and acceptable to those of different faiths. 

While I agree with her, I wonder if she is overstating the problem. Most of the time, the arguments against decriminalisation of homosexuality, at least as seen in commentaries and letters in the press, have not been bald assertions of faith. They've been attempts at public reason.

Perhaps this is because the Straits Times' own editors have culled away those letters with faith-based arguments, thus explaining why we haven't seen them. If that's so, then Chua's call to use public reason is warranted, and it's only through the vigilance of editors that the situation hasn't deteriorated into religious battle-cries.

But I don't think so. The Christian rightwing in Singapore -- and surely, I don't have to explain by now that they are the main source of anti-gay campaigning -- is fully conscious that they are a minority here. That being the case, it would only be sensible for them to avoid overtly Christian arguments.

In fact, the only recent slip-up that I've seen reported in the Straits Times were the words of Lim Biow Chuan, a member of parliament from the People's Action Party. He said, "I think the position of the Church is correct, which is that we should hate the sin (homosexuality) but embrace the sinner." [2]

Well, well, well.

* * * * *

 
I wish to thank a Yawning Bread reader, Chow Khoon, for drawing my attention to an online video of a lecture by Jonathan Haidt [3], in which the academic explained the sources of morality. Liberals and conservatives, he said, drew differentially from these sources.

Haidt explained that it is possible to discern five foundations for morality, each foundation giving rise to a key virtue. They are:

From surveys that he conducted among people who described themselves as 'liberals', 'conservatives' or various points in between, he plotted a graph thus:

Liberals gave high weightage to the questions of harm and fairness when it came to constructing their ideas of morality, and much lower weightage to group loyalty, respect for authority and striving for purity. Haidt described them as the "2-foundation" type.

Conservatives gave virtually equal weight to all five foundations -- they are the "5-foundation" type.

Most people on this earth, Haidt said, tend to be the 5-foundation type. This is possible in stable, traditional societies. On the other hand, places where different peoples come together tend to have more individuals holding liberal ideas with their 2-foundation way of looking at morality.

He didn't say, but it was obvious why that should be the case. The 3rd, 4th and 5th foundations (namely, ingroup, authority and purity) are culture-dependent. Who constitutes the group? Whose authority is to be respected? What's pure and impure?

Conversely, harm and fairness are questions that are generally species-wide. So long as we are interacting with other humans, we have a common idea -- hard-wired into us perhaps -- of what constitutes harm (and its obverse, kindness), and fairness. When different cultures mix, these are the two foundations that can provide a common language.

* * * * *

 
Looking back at the letters written to the Straits Times so far, we can see this quite clearly. The anti-gay letters, although they resemble the tenor of American rightwing anti-gay rhetoric, basically argue along two lines: homosexuality causes harm and legitimising it results in unfairness.

Yvonne Lee, in her first commentary piece [4], argued that "It is a known medical fact that homosexual intercourse or sodomy is an inherently unhealthy act that carries higher risks of a number of sexually transmitted infections. The law should not facilitate acts which threaten public health."

She also asserted that "An active homosexual agenda has engendered clashes with fundamental liberties such as free speech and religious liberty."

Alan Chin likewise went down the same road. "Homosexuality certainly fits the definition of a disease as there is an increased mortality rate mainly from Aids," he wrote in his letter of 8 May 2007 [5].

In a slight variation of the fairness argument, he also made the point that it would not be unfair to criminalise homosexuality, since it "is neither a fixed trait nor is it immutable."

There is thus an attempt to apply public reasoning to the debate. They, unlike the above-mentioned member of parliament, are not citing God.

The problem though is that on closer examination, their arguments are very weak. I won't go into the details here, since others have done so in various letters of rebuttal, but in a nutshell, the argument of disease has a poor fit with sexual orientation per se, the notion of a "homosexual agenda" out to curtail others' fundamental rights is more imagined than real, and the idea that gays can change is simply rejected by the vast bulk of scientific and psychology-professional opinion.

Miak Siew pointed out in his letter of 10 May 2007 that Alan Chin was being selective in his choice of evidence [6], while Lee Jin Hian said the conclusion that homosexuals can change was a "skyscraper erected on a foundation of straw" (letter 19 May 2007 [7]).

And we know why. The anti-gay position does not spring from a dispassionate evaluation of the harm principle or the fairness principle; if one did, one would most likely come to a pro-equality position. The anti-gay position in truth springs from the the 4th and 5th foundations, of respect for (scriptural) authority and vague notions of purity -- sex for pleasure is wrong, so unless procreating, the erotic is impure. Plausibly, it may also spring from the third foundation -- that of group loyalty: defending Christian teaching against the secular tide, etc.

But these are faith and culture-specific, and raising them in public debate begs the question of which god's banner one is raising. That would tip them over the line in the sand that Chua Mui Hoong (and the Singapore government) has drawn.

* * * * *

 
The over-arching question is what Singapore wants/needs to be. It's nice to be a stable, homogenous, relatively unchanging society. In such a society, 5-foundation morality works, with a huge majority subscribing to similar notions of group identity, authority and what constitutes pure and impure.

But economically, we'd be dead.

Singapore needs to be, in fact, we've always been, an entrepot of commerce, ideas and peoples. A 5-foundation morality may work for each individual privately, but it cannot work for public morality in Singapore. To try to apply it publicly would permit intolerance and xenophobia to thrive.

For our future, we've got to learn to settle issues primarily through the harm and fairness principles. We've got to learn to distinguish valid arguments from spurious ones that pretend to be harm and fairness considerations, but are in fact trojan horses for the other foundational yearnings.

© Yawning Bread