As you can see -- not that you haven't heard from other sources by now -- it was a two-speaker event, with Thio Li-Ann, law lecturer and one of Singapore's best-known anti-gay campaigners, as the first speaker. Other bits of information on the announcement would lead you to deduce the real aim of Singanews.

Not that they were hiding it. As reported by someone named Timothy Seow who attended the session:

In a presentation littered with passages from the Bible (it was a church after all), Thio asserted her right as Christian to speak on public issues. She argued that as a Christian, it is part of one’s religious call to articulate their views in public especially on contentious such as casinos, same-sex marriage, euthanasia and stem-cell research. She warned that if Christians do not speak up, others who may hold conflicting views will speak up and forcefully occupy the secular public space, which in fact is what they have already done vociferously.... 

... Depicting Christianity as a victimized religion, she warned Christians about the difficulties they face, especially on the Internet, as others would invariably paint them as oppressive, emotional and irrational. She added that while Christians are tolerant of others views, the others do not have the same toleration for Christians, which she thought was unfair.

The next sentence from Timothy Seow's report I found interesting.

Towards the end, Thio was somewhat emotional and questioned the Christians why are they not angry when Christian views are being attacked publicly. If Christians continue to remain silent then their freedom will be lost eventually. She ended by debunking neutrality in politics and urged Christians to take up a position and speak up for the common good.

This suggests that she is sore about not getting support from the broader group who are Christian. Does this not suggest that other Christians find her views embarrassing and distasteful? This would indeed be consistent with what I have seen. Many Christians I know disagree with her position.

Then Matthew Yap, CEO of Singanews, rose to speak, introducing his new online platform.

Yap began by stating that Singanews was secular and not just for Christians as it included editors of other religions. Yap also stated that the idea was not borne out of the AWARE saga as they had already been toying with the idea since mid-90s but they did not have the financial capability then. Yap shared that a group of well-wishers have provided them the seed money but he stopped short of revealing who they were... 

... Yap took the opportunity to introduce the editorial board of Singanews. Teo Hwee Nak, who is a Christian and former journalist with TODAY, CNA and Lianhe Zaobao. PN Balji, a Hindu, renowned journalist, former MediaCorp Editor and presenter for CNA. Jeffrey Tsang, former Business Times journalist. Samuel Wong, who was in-charge of Mandarin news and Hiliary Chan, a techie and Malaysian staying in Malacca. Also mentioned but not present was "Wen Hong" and former The New Paper sports journalist Suresh Nair, a Hindu.

is owned by Singa Communications set up by ex Straits Times journalist Matthew Yap. The company has about $90,000 in seed funding.

It was supposed to be a "secular" news portal to "offer alternative viewpoints and fill in the gaps left by mainstream media which sometimes fails to cover a story due to one reason or another", but its soft launch took place in a church.

Matthew Yap himself is a Christian. Two of its directors – Lee Chong Kai and Victor Ho are Christians too. The latter is also a director of Bright Arrows, an investment company owed 40 per cent by the Church of Our Savior. The venture has been seeking funds from the Christian community.

Temasek Review pointed out that in an interview with The New Paper, Matthew Yap said Singanews would come with the perspective of "mainstream family values", and by this, he meant a "generational, natural family which focuses on procreation."

This is exactly the same language as used by Focus on the Family, Church of Our Saviour and plenty of anti-gay fundamentalist Christian groups in both the United States and Singapore. This is code for saying: We are anti-gay.

Procreation is used as a test of moral fitness. "Mainstream family" is spin language to suggest that those who share their anti-gay views are "normal" and the majority, and those who don't are "abnormal" and marginal aliens.

* * * * *

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, released a statement 10 September 2009, apologising for the inhumane treatment of mathematician Alan Turing, on account of the fact that he was gay. Alan Turing was one of the heroes of the Second World War. Without his contribution in breaking German codes, Britain and allied powers would not have been able to listen in on German military communications, and the world as we know it today might be very, very different.

As you can see from the Number 10 Downing Street website, the statement reads:

2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

It got me thinking: When will the Singapore government apologise for the witch-hunt it carried out against gay men in the 1990s? As I wrote in my chapter in the book Impressions of the Goh Chok Tong Years,

In April 1990, nine men were arrested in the Hong Lim Park area "in a surprise police raid on homosexual activities". Seven of them pleaded guilty to what The Straits Times described as "soliciting for immoral purposes in a public place" and were fined $500 each. Their names, ages and occupations were published in the newspaper. In August 1990, two men were caught, also at Hong Lim Park, and sentenced to two months’ jail for "gross indecency". In July 1991, two policemen were sent as decoys to Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre, which had acquired a reputation as a cruising area among gay men. Four men were entrapped, arrested and fined $800 each.

These were just the tip of the iceberg. Many more undercover operations and arrests were conducted without reports in the press. In fact, as researcher Russell Heng noted in his paper, Tiptoe Out of the Closet, "the stories of police surveillance of gay cruising places were increasing. Not only were gay people being entrapped but their pictures were being published in the newspapers. There seemed to be an agenda to make examples of them".8 Virtually no one stood up to such official tactics until Josef Ng’s performance in January 1994, protesting the arrests of September 1993. This performance and its fallout are discussed in the next section on the arts.

Like previous operations, the police sent decoys into the overgrown park near Tanjong Rhu on 19 September 1993. They arrested 12 men, whose names were published as soon as they were charged. Six of them pleaded guilty and were given jail terms ranging from two to six months, but unlike most previous convictions, were also sentenced to three strokes of the cane.

Below is an example of a Straits Times' story of that period. Notice that the arrests came about through police entrapment:

23 November 1993
Straits Times

Twelve men were arrested for alleged sexual offences in the space of a week at a reclaimed piece of land at Tanjong Rhu during an anti-gay operation by the police.

Among those arrested in the operation and charged with allegedly outraging their victims' modesty were a broadcasting producer and a butcher.

In the mid-September operation, plainclothes policemen from the Geylang Police Division Headquarters posed as decoys.

They would identify themselves when contact was made before back-up officers moved in to help round up the alleged offenders.

Only six of the 12 men pleaded guilty in court yesterday.

The rest claimed trial.

[truncated]

The rest of the Straits Times story went on to name all twelve, including the six who claimed innocence, describing their ages and occupations.

* * * * *

 
Thio, in her now infamous 2007 Parliamentary speech, personified attempts to turn back the clock. Singanews, from what we know, may be intended as a platform to do likewise. They will use the cloak of secularism, "family", Hindus and freedom of speech to push for the primacy of their Biblical views, the destruction of families with gay children, and the curtailment of gay people's freedom of expression, including expression of love.

What is it about the growing wisdom that the rest of the world has about gay people, as exemplified by Gordon Brown's statement, that these fundies find so threatening? What private demons are they struggling with?

© Yawning Bread