Homosexuality

“The view we take here is that there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” This was the view of the late Canadian Justice Minister, Pierre Trudeau, who later rose to become the 15th Prime Minister of Canada. A true maverick, who once did a pirouette behind the back of Queen Elisabeth II, Trudeau proposed a set of amendments to the Criminal Code, in 1967, which included easing the noose on homosexuals. Two years later the amendments were passed into the Criminal Code and homosexuality was legalized in Canada.

Gay, In?

Homosexuality has seemingly always been thought of as something unnatural, something immoral and repugnant. And it is this ideology that has seen homosexuals suffer various forms of persecution. Throughout history, there have been well-documented cases of homosexual persecution. But the peculiar thing, of which I am sure many would find astonishment in, is that there was a time when homosexuality was accepted.

Homosexuality was by large openly practised during the High Middle Ages. In fact, homosexuality seemed to have thrived in monasteries. Monks would pen erotic poems admiring the beauty of males. Bishop Marbod of Rennes (1035-1123) penned the following poem.

The Unyielding Youth

Horace composed an ode about a certain boy
Whose face was so lovely he could easily have been a girl,
Whose hair fell in waves against his ivory neck,
Whose forehead was white as snow and his eyes black as pitch,
Whose soft cheeks were full of delicious sweetness
When they bloomed in the brightness of a blush of beauty,
His nose was perfect, his lips flame red, lovely his teeth-
An exterior formed in measure to match his mind.

Marbod was definitely not the only person to have written such outlandishly homosexual literature and there were many other works to the effect of Marbod’s poem which obviously celebrated homosexuality. And the fact that this form of behavior was rarely frowned upon speaks volumes about the level of homosexual acceptance during this time. In fact another French monk, Bernard of Morlaix, had remarked that homosexuals “are as numerous as grains of barley, as many as the shells of the sea or the sands of the shore.”

Gay, Not In...

This brings us to an important question. How did things change so much so that homosexually became widely condemned?

The 12th century saw a Europe which was infatuated with the idea of returning to the glory of the Roman Empire. To do this, order was essential; there was a want for uniformity which meant that deviations from the norm were met with hostility, and to achieve such a goal, the Church and government began to work together with the Church taking an increasingly important role in the affairs of state. And soon there came a point where the Church and the state were almost as one. With the Church taking a greater role in government, it was inevitable that certain repressions would result.

Get In!

But it’s not necessary to establish how homosexuality plunged to the dire state it now occupies in the world. What really is needed is the unconditional appreciation that people are different. Well, actually there already is this general understanding but somehow people are able to ‘forget’ that homosexuals are people. That, to me, is the most repugnant thing in the world.

There are many things in this world that I disapprove of. There are many opinions that I would never subscribe to. But as Voltaire once said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it".

Freedom is the one thing in this world that I respect. And anyone with a rational mind (I do hope that's not too rare), would be able to feel the same way. One does not think with the heart, but rather with the mind.

The Meaning of Democracy

Many countries, especially in the west, are supposedly democratic. But what makes a nation truly democratic? What are the ideas behind true democracy? It has been defined as the distribution of power, where every citizen of the state can vote and a government would be formed based on these votes. Basically, the people have the power to install a government of their choice which would serve the people. That is but one ideal of democracy. True democracy must have the freedom of thought, speech and action. The need to express one's self unreservedly must be present in a true democracy for in a state where there is limited freedoms, there can be multiple backlashes which would violate the very essence of democracy.

Critique

Where freedom is restricted, the restriction of people’s intellectual expression will follow. When the freedom of speech is not present, people cannot voice their opinions and critique. Critique is what makes people think. People need to be challenged to think and without the freedom of speech there are no two sides of a matter but just the governing body’s side of that matter. This is detrimental to the growth of a society. A society where people cannot voice intellectual opposition to various matters regarding philosophy, religion or politics, is a dead society. The debates and thinking which would be present in a free society, are what makes a society vibrant and dynamic and not docile or ignorant. In addition to this, a society where one cannot voice their opinions will make the people of that society one sided and they will not be aware of opposition to convention. This will mean that opposition to a ruling party will find it hard to win power as the people don’t even know the true extent of the society they are living in. Ignorance of Man will be detrimental to true democracy. This ignorance would be a result of the lack of a free society. Thus, it must be said that a nation is only democratic when there it is a free country.

Singapore

One good example of a nation that is said to be democratic but has various restrictions that limit the freedom of speech, is the Republic of Singapore. Singapore, located in South-East Asia, is a nation with a solid economy and a clean environment. The leaders of Singapore also maintain that the Singaporean Government has made Singapore a stable nation.

I agree that the Singapore Government, made up of the ruling People’s Action Party, is a stable one. But what does stability actually mean? Stability is defined as a state of being stable and stable refers to something that is not subject to sudden fluctuations. Stability is also akin to predictability. For the economy, this is a good thing but for the political system of Singapore, this is something that is not good. It is common knowledge that the People’s Action Party (PAP) have won every election they contested in since 1959. This means that Singapore has never had any other political party making up the government for more than 40 years. A key reason for the PAP’s long monopoly of politics in Singapore is the lack of the freedom of speech. Singapore has a handful of papers which are all under the Singapore Press Holdings which has close ties to the PAP. The media is thus tightly controlled. A tightly controlled media cannot be objective and news will undoubtedly be one-sided and biased. This means that political opposition rarely gets publicity through newspaper, television or radio. Even more alarming is that most people within a nation which employs various restrictions on the freedom of speech do not actually know the true extent of the evils which occur within their country.

Singapore has laws in place which allow the ruling elite to intimidate political opponents. One such law is the Internal Security Act which allows for just about anyone to be detained without trial for as long as deemed necessary by the PAP. This law has been used to detain more than a hundred of opposition members and unionists in 1963. This large-scale operation was dubbed Operation Coldstore and it must be noted that it was carried out just before the 1963 elections.

An excerpt from a report in The Sunday Times on the 3rd of February 1963:

At least 107 left-wing politicians and trade unionists in Singapore were arrested today in the biggest and "most important" security operation since the Emergency. The operation is continuing.

The swoop, aimed at preventing subversives from establishing a "Communist Cuba" in Singapore and mounting violence just before Malaysia, was carried out by the Singapore police assisted by men from the Federation.

The PAP claimed that those who were arrested were communists who were in some way responsible for acts of “mounting violence” just before the establishment of a merger with Malaya. Most of the “left-wing politicians” were in fact of the Barisan Sosialis, an opposition party that was accused of being of communist ideology by the PAP. The Barisan Sosialis strongly refuted this claim. The Barisan Sosialis, made up of former PAP members who left and formed their own party, were actually a very big threat to the PAP. The PAP recognized this and it is my belief that this was a major factor in the decision to launch Operation Coldstore. And if the arrests of more than a hundred opponents of the PAP were not enough, the PAP carried on misusing this law numerous times after Operation Coldstore. The most famous, or rather infamous, detention was that of Chia Thye Poh. Chia, an MP and an opposition politician, was arrested at the headquarters of the Barisan Sosialis in 1966. He was accused of being a communist, a claim which he denied repeatedly. He only became a free man in 1998. These arrests serve as deterrents to future opponents of the overbearing arm of the government. These deterrents have created a virtual one-party system in Singapore. A government which discourages opposition cannot be a democratic one because democracy is essentially about choice. The people must be able to choose their own leaders freely.

Freedom

Basically a democracy is the distribution of power but this distribution of power is illegitimate when there are various restrictions on freedoms. In the case of Singapore, we observe a country that perhaps cannot be considered democratic because of the lack of freedom.

Voltaire was once quoted saying:

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Fundamentally, Voltaire is saying that we are entitled to freedom; we are born free but if we do not utilize our rights then we will find that people who wish to rule over us will do so and in the process we will find whatever freedom we may have had would have dissipated.

Religion

But then he also mentions that tyrants will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. This leads us to ask what the role of religion in democracy is and does religion advocate democracy? Voltaire was not really a democrat but he strongly believed in freedom of expression and opposed any political system or religion that restricted various freedoms.

Religion and freedom, especially intellectual freedom, have often been perceived at being at ends. Classic examples are that of the early Catholic Church and its supposed intolerance of ideas contradictory to Catholic teachings. Persecutions of intellectuals whose ideas were not favourable to that of the church were not uncommon. Famous examples include Galileo Galilee, the famous Italian mathematician whose ideas mostly infuriated the Catholic Church leading to his persecution in the form of imprisonment and the prohibition of publication of his ideas. Once, he was even required to publicly retract his theory of heliocentrism whereby the sun was believed to be at the centre of the universe. In addition to this example, there existed quite a range of other persecutions of freedom on the basis of religion, not only of the Catholic faith but also of a few others.

The question here is, does religion have a place in democracy?

Religion

Religion is a great thing. It really is, though the atheists out there would beg to differ. It gives people hope. People need religion because without it they feel incomplete. The whole idea of a God is great because it makes people feel good.

We Need God

I, myself, admit that there are times when I feel scared or vulnerable and thinking of or praying to a God really helps whether He exists or not. I am sure there is much that can be said to persuade one that God does exist, and at the same time there will information to state otherwise.

The thing is, as someone once said, if God never existed then it would have been necessary to create him. Whether real or not, God helps people. People who need something in their lives, some sort of being they can look up to.

I was looking through Yahoo! Answers and I saw a reply posted, by a Nicholas H, to a question regarding religion which went like this:

religion is for the weak minded who refuse to believe that they might be alone in this life, or are too scared to consider the possibility that when you die: that's it, game over

Well, that is one way of looking at it. Nicholas obviously is an atheist and what he says is reasonable. It is possible that no God exists, and we have invented him in order to fulfil our desires, to clog an empty feeling within our hearts. Nicholas probably believes that people like him (atheists) are realists who do not need faith to feel complete.

We Feel God?

I was talking to a Christian friend one day and I asked him, "How can you be so sure that there is a God out there?" He looked at me knowingly and told me that he just knew, he just knew.

Just before starting this blog, sometime last month, I had posted a little comment on someone else's blog. My comment was regarding religion.

I had said:

To believe in God would take a tremendous leap of faith. Faith is blind, lacking facts and based on an individuals belief in something. But to believe in no divine entity seems much simpler.

But now I think maybe faith is not so blind. After all the blind are still able to smell, hear and touch, are they not? Perhaps if one really looked, they would find truth.

Also I had commented that:

We do not know of God through experience. We do not know of Him through reasoning. We only know of Him through revelations. And these have been passed down through generations and generations. No one living would ever have had a personal experience with God. This means that belief in God is bound to be largely a matter of faith.

My friend read this and asked me, "You have never experienced God?" I said no, without much thought and he proceeded to say, "Well, maybe you will one day." I believe he meant that people who are religious actually feel that God is out there. They can feel Him. Maybe that's a trick the mind plays. Or it could be real.

I believe I have established that people are drawn towards religion. Now, with religion being such a crowd pleaser, it seems inevitable that someone's going to use religion as a tool. Or a weapon.

Religion In the Tool-Shed?

I read the news with much interest, because lately there is always some mention of religion somewhere. Especially when leaders are speaking. I did some research and found that many leaders including George Bush refer to God or some divine entity when speaking. Even Osama does it. In his videos sent from god-knows-where (what an apt saying), Osama always refers to God (Allah). Bush always claims that God is with them, and at the same time does Osama. Even Saddam Hussein, who was very much a secular leader, made a big show of praying to God at mosques and referring to Him. Maybe these men have some believe in God but when they refer to Him, they know very well that many people are watching and most of these people believe in God. In this way, religion becomes a tool. A tool to satisfy some objective.

Religion is a great thing, I must say again, whether or not it's real. Practicing an appropriate religion can never be bad. The only problem is when religion is made use of by people more concerned about other matters.

To end, let me quote a portion of my early comment on religion:

It all boils down to the individual and his perception of things.

Choices are made everyday. We have to make so many choices in our short, and largely insignificant, lives, and definitely a few will be wrong ones. The best we can hope for is to limit our wrongs and maximize our rights.

Thus, readers, wherever our ideals lie, let's try to keep things nice.