The Pitters' Place

After India decriminalised consensual sex between men, the debate has reached Singapore and people suck. Regular homophobia is one thing, as are the usual arguments which I may disagree with but at least find internally consistent. But here are some of the typical arguments that have been flying around / going viral on social media / launching petitions that get 100k+ signatures:

- If gay sex is no longer illegal, naked gay men will be having gay sex in public in front of Your Children and how will you explain this to them??
(public sex and nudity are already illegal btw, and this law does nothing to affect that. I am very, very baffled at how often variants of this comment have been popping up, where lots of people seem to think that this law is the only thing stopping mass gay orgies in the streets. Also, it is already legal (and has always been legal) for gay men and lesbians to make out in public in terms of cuddling and kissing, and yet they're not doing that because #1: Asian culture is generally conservative when it comes to PDA and #2: they don't want to be beaten up.)
- Our national army will be weakened by because soldiers will be having sex with each other all the time and getting AIDS instead of learning how to defend our country
- It would become legal for men to rape boys (no it won't. It is, however, currently legal for women to rape anybody, and for husbands to rape their wives.)
- Straight men will be forced to have sex with any gay man who flirts with them
- The local population will go extinct within a generation because everyone will be having gay sex instead of having children, and then the foreigners would outnumber us and steal all our jobs.
- We would end up like America. solely America. America is apparently the only country where gay sex is not illegal, and where decriminalisation of male homosexuality is clearly a slippery slope to people shooting up schools, straight people aborting babies, and bakeries being sued for not making gay wedding cakes.
- This is all a ploy to eventually legalise 'phidophia'. The guy said 'phidophia' at least twice, in all seriousness. He was very serious.
- If we don't stop this now, bestiality and necrophilia will be legal because that's what the LGBT agenda is ultimately about (other than the phidophia, obviously), clearly because the crematoriums are full of ash piles dying (pun intended) to have sex with the living. (due to land constraints, we have very, very few graveyards. the vast majority of dead people are in jars.)
- We don't criminalise lesbian sex because lesbians can't have sex, duh
- This is a slippery slope to "multiple transgenders for preschoolers". I don't know what that is, other than a great band name.

The law isn't even actively enforced, but its presence does mean that anti-discrimination policies are illegal, LGBT support groups, charities and homeless shelters cannot be officially registered, gay men who have been assaulted or abused by their partners have nowhere to turn to for fear of being arrested, only negative portrayals of LGBT people are allowed in the media, school sex ed is prohibited from mentioning LGBT people at all, and various other things that don't affect the vast majority of people who think this will somehow lead to the destruction of society.

The fact that all those voices currently far outnumber those of the LGBT community and allies is quite depressing. Being denied human rights due to standard bigotry is somehow easier to bear than being denied those rights due to complete stupidity. I try not to blatantly insult other people's intelligence like that, but this has been a trying time. I was lucky to have been out of the country for the bulk of it, but now I'm back.

The whole "if we make this thing legal, then people will do this other thing that will still be illegal" is a common and weird argument for various things.

We saw it a lot in the US with transgender bathroom stuff recently... "if you allow transgender women into the women's room, then men will claim to be transgender so that they can go into the women's room and rape girls". As if somehow these men are willing to break the laws against rape, but they aren't willing to break laws stating that they can't go into women's rooms. The rapists would never dream of breaking laws about which bathroom they can use.

Are these reasons you list actually the most common ones? Or just some examples? I don't know the religious makeup of Singapore, but I would have expected the arguments to be more similar to America, where most people argue from a religious perspective, and try to hide the homophobia a bit more, behind arguments like "I have nothing against gay people, I just think that it's a sin".

As if somehow these men are willing to break the laws against rape, but they aren't willing to break laws stating that they can't go into women's rooms.

Yeah, that.

Singaporean homophobia is unique in that there aren't many common arguments yet, because the issue is still relatively new and people haven't yet come together to consolidate their thoughts. But that's starting to happen in mainstream Christian circles, which is heavily influenced by the US Christian Right and takes a lot of the arguments from there, including those that don't make sense in our context. Other than that, a large proportion are individuals with their own pet theories, which is how things get so weird. Lots of people still don't personally know a single LGBT person. Others don't even seem to know what being gay actually is. Others are almost definitely closeted and unaware, given how they go on about how if gay marriage became legal, no one would bother marrying the opposite sex any more and humanity will go extinct. (Some of those people are currently married, which makes me worry for their spouses.)

While the religious (particularly Christian) voices are definitely among the most vocal (and political), there's also a lot of non-religious homophobia around. We're about 20% Christian, 15% Muslim (they've been a lot quieter on the issue), ~45% Buddhist and Taoist, 5% Hindu, 16% no religion; from the atheist camp there are people trying to argue from an evolutionary perspective and trying to be all logical and scientific about what parts go where, and there's a good amount of homophobia coming from the sort of guys who think that a good way to prove their manliness is to joke about beating up gay people. Latest survey statistics show that about 80% of people here believe homosexuality is wrong. It's a slight improvement from a few years back when it was closer to 90%, but there's still a long way to go.

So the internet has been terrible of late, and I've heard from LGBT friends that these conversations are also happening within their families; through social media I've heard of at least two suicides since this started. I've been lucky to be mostly spared because I have a supportive family and church and a very chill boss, but there's this hostility in the air that is not fun.

Power doesn't give a shit about consistency. Not only does it not give a shit, but the people who make these kinds of bad faith arguments actively enjoy doing so because they get off on it...it's an exercise of that power.

"I'm gonna make these lazy arguments while plugging my fingers in my ears ...and there's not a damn thing you can do about it."

I wish power had better English, at least. >_>