| Yawning
Bread. November 2007
Nasal straws in the wind
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Emotions ran so high after Nominated Member of Parliament Thio Li-Ann's outburst
of a speech [1], which included the reference to "shoving a straw
up your nose to drink", it's taking a while for tempers to cool.
In the last 2 weeks, there have been more blogposts and letters to the press than I can keep track of. Any hope I had of keeping a record of them in Yawning Bread now has to be abandoned. However, there were 3 notable -- to me, at least -- moments in the wake of the unsuccessful Parliamentary petition to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code. Amidst the sound and fury, readers may not have seen their significance, but I have a funny feeling they're straws in the wind -- indicators of what the future may bring. Let me share my thoughts with you. 'Today' newspaper reported on 7 November that a threatening letter had been sent to the NMP. The newspaper said that "the words 'hate', 'hatred' and 'hurt' were repeated no less than 10 times" on the single A4-sized sheet of paper that came in a brown envelope. The Straits Times followed up with their story the next day (8 November), noting that the letter included the words, "we know where you work, we'll send people there to hunt you down". It also threatened her family with bodily harm. Thio made a police report. She told Today, "This is a physical threat". Naturally, both newspapers' stories focussed on how wrong it was to make threats. They sought out Siew Kum Hong, the NMP who presented the petition to repeal Section 377A to Parliament, for his views. They also quoted Stuart Koe and myself. All of us felt that personal threats could not be condoned. Lost in all that was the interesting detail that the Straits Times revealed:
Evidently, a copy of the letter had been sent either directly to the journalist or to a newsroom. [2] My friend Dominic noticed it. He found this detail "terribly suspicious". "Why on earth would someone sending [Thio] hate mail send a copy of it to a journalist?" he asked. "It really reeks of a smear campaign, rather than something done by a gay person in a moment of unthinking frustration and fury." Indeed, he has a point. If you're really out to threaten someone, you send the threat to him and try not to make a song and dance about it to journalists. To do so would generate publicity that must surely complicate your malicious plan. Even if you're doing it out of extreme frustration with no intention to carry out the threat, what purpose would be served sending a copy to a journalist? Unless, the intent from the start was publicity. If so, who would gain from it? Which side of the gay debate would reap public sympathy from being portrayed as victims of threats? If this episode is what I think it possibly is, then that side has disgraced itself even more than previously imagined. It's departing even further from (ir)rational arguments to devious manipulation. An inside source from the Straits Times told me recently that readers of their opinion-editorials generally fall into two groups: those who read most columns except Andy Ho's, and those who absolutely adore Doctor Andy Ho's pieces. Indeed his columns signal unmistakably his Christian foundations, and often show very little understanding of gay people or our issues. A tourist friend of mine was once so irked by what Ho wrote, he gave up an afternoon of sightseeing to sit at a computer in order to write and email a letter rebutting some absurd comments Ho had made. As did Siew Kum Hong, who took the trouble to gather 32 signatures in support. And this was way back in 2003. [3] Imagine my disorientation when I saw Andy Ho's piece of 3 November. It was straight-forward reporting, not a commentary, and it was all about how the Chinese heartlanders saw homosexuality. Based on an interview with Jeffrey Tan who teaches at Nanyang Technological University, Ho wrote,
Further on,
And then,
And this insight hits the nail on the head:
In this unusual article, Andy Ho paints a very different picture of Singapore society from the pious crowd one might otherwise associate him with. Is this strategic? Or is the article merely the result of interviews that stemmed from his own intellectual curiosity? It's difficult to know the significance of this turn. Less than a week later, a commentary in the Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao was brought to my attention. Titled "The problem of ambiguity in Singapore's sex laws" [4], it was written by a well-known writer, Huang Haowei (Ng How Wee). The article traced the old Section 377 and retained 377A to the British colonial period and Victorian England, though the concept of unnatural sex, Huang said, came originally from Christianity. However, the Victorian period was well known for its climate of sexual repression and hypocrisy. There were also double-standards. It was easier for men to divorce their wives on grounds of adultery than the other way around. Today, such discriminatory and religiously-based laws are considered archaic and have been cast aside in Britain, he wrote, yet in Singapore, we still want to retain them. Huang went on to discuss the incompatibility of basing laws on a particular religion's ideas with the fact that we are a secular state. Finally, he touched on how Thio Li-Ann's speech in Parliament was actually drawn from the extreme Religious Right's ideas, as other commentators, e.g. Janadas Devan, had pointed out. Did the parliamentarians who applauded her know what they were cheering about? Concluding his commentary, Huang asked: Does Singapore have a secular system worthy of the name? Throughout the months when the debate about Section 377A was in full swing, I noticed that Zaobao remained very quiet about it, beyond the rare letter to the editor. As I have mentioned before, this suggested that it was a non-issue to the Chinese-speaking section of our population. Now, through Huang's article, the issue has finally been given prominence. The comfort the editors displayed in accepting and publishing his commentary appears to confirm that his point of view would not be out of line with the paper's readers. It also suggests that the editors can sense that Huang's tack would not seriously cross the government's newly-revealed line of thinking. But Huang's article also has the potential to change attitudes. Now that the Christian roots of our sex laws, and by extension, those calling for their retention, have been highlighted, there will be a tendency for the Chinese heartland to distance themselves from them. They'd see these roots as alien to their culture. It will take many more such efforts, of
course, to produce any real shift; Huang's commentary is just the first
straw in the wind. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
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