News website TODAY reported that Yee’s former lawyer, Mr Alfred Dodwell, confirmed that Yee was arrested on Wednesday (May 11). Mr Dodwell was contacted by Yee’s mother for help.
According to TODAY, Yee did not report to a police station when instructed to do so then. Police said that Yee left Singapore “and remained overseas for a prolonged period until his return in April”. The blogger was last spotted attending Bukit Batok by-election rallies held by the Singapore Democratic Party early this month.
When served a Warrant of Attendance upon his return to report, he failed to do so again.
TODAY also said that Yee uploaded a video last week of the police presenting him a warrant to appear before the police for investigation on Tuesday.
Yee was found guilty on May 12, 2015, of uploading an obscene image and making remarks intending to hurt the feelings of Christians in a video. He was sentenced to 4 weeks jail on July 7, with his sentence backdated after spending nearly 50 days in remand.
Local celebrities Neo Swee Lin and Lim Kay Siu donned the SDP uniform when they attended the M1-Straits Times Life Theatre Awards 2016. They won best ensemble for their play HOTEL.
They joined us at BB last night for coffee. Swee Lin’s father told me that he was a PAP grassroots leader for 25 years working with PAP MPs Ibrahim Othman and Lee Chiaw Meng.
He left the outfit and has never supported any other party. Until now that is. He came wearing the SDP uniform. The SDP is honoured and grateful.
In the space of three short months recently, Singaporean society witnessed outpourings of concern over the planned public performances of two major international stars: Adam Lambert and Madonna.
Last November, an online petition that objected to Lambert’s “promotion of a highly sexualised lifestyle and LGBT rights” collected about 20,000 signatures. In February, it was reported in the news that eight pastors representing various Christian denominations met Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam to express concerns over possible religiously offensive content in Madonna’s planned concert.
In each case, heated discussions followed everywhere online as ordinary Singaporeans argued for and against the merits of these objections.
These events point to two interesting features of current Singaporean politics.
First, while once communal concerns over issues of public morality were largely dealt with behind closed doors, over the past 10 years or so we have begun to see public lobbying over moral and cultural issues such as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) rights, “sanctity of life” issues including abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia and others like the decision to build integrated resorts.
Second, social media platforms have become part of our public political space – an important outlet for people sharing political news and opinions – but some of this public interaction has historically been less than civil.
It was a product of these two observations that the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) recently carried out a study on “The New Singaporean Pluralism”. This involved closed-door focus group discussions and individual interviews with many prominent public advocates on all sides of the issues of LGBT rights and the “sanctity of life”.
We attempted to identify the specific basic points of contention and the objectionable advocacy tactics that have been used in recent years. But more importantly, we attempted to tease out the potential principles and practices of governance that may help maintain the civility of our shared political space so as to be able to apply them to future disagreements.
Some of the points of contention were expected. For example, LGBT rights advocates want the LGBT community to have protective rights because having an LGBT identity is not a choice, whereas anti-LGBT rights advocates think otherwise. They believe that even if same-sex attraction is not a choice, same-sex sexual behaviour is inescapably a choice. Whether LGBT identities are choices is an empirical question that scientists all over the world are still trying to answer, but since the issue is shifting towards behaviour rather than attraction, in the eyes of anti-LGBT rights advocates, even finding the gay gene may not be sufficient to convince them that LGBT persons deserve protective rights.
As for “sanctity of life” issues, it was perhaps also no surprise that each constituent issue revolved around contentions about how to measure the value of a life against other goods like autonomy or public safety, or how to measure longer lives against better quality lives. Of course, unsurprisingly, the role of the government and its ability to make final decisions in these areas is contentious as well.
These findings point towards a need for further research on the empirical claims of all sides of the two topics, but whether empirical evidence will settle these issues is an open question, because these types of disagreement are at bottom based on differences in how we value certain goods and principles. In order to maintain the civility of our political space, what we need are ways to manage these cleavages without either suppressing them or letting them boil over into violence.
Thus, it is heartening to note that there was a consensus against using hate speech, dehumanising speech and name-calling in public advocacy. It is interesting to note, however, the difficulties in the details.
First, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes such unacceptable speech. Second, different groups and organisations have different levels of tolerance for these practices. And third, advocates can easily offend their opponents without meaning to. For example, the word “lifestyle” is intended by anti-LGBT rights advocates here to neutrally describe LGBT identities; however, the term is considered offensive in the LGBT community because the word implies that their identities are choices and it is taken as trivialising their identities.
Despite the kind of unsavoury language that might be used in online political discussions regarding moral and cultural disagreements, the majority of our participants valued the freedom of speech and information made possible by social media too much to try to institute further controls – though how effective communal self-policing can be going forward remains an open question.
It was nevertheless suggested that we would do well to teach civic and democratic values in schools. Our youth would learn not only how to comport themselves civilly in the unmediated realm of social media but also how to honestly negotiate democratic practices such as debating and lobbying for support. All these require them to develop the type of empathy needed to understand the perspectives of opponents even while fighting their own corner.
Additionally, the experiences we had in organising the focus group discussions were instructive on how we may be able to minimise the hostility and demonisation that often accompany such moral and cultural cleavages.
Beyond the more obvious principles such as having discussion platforms that are neutral as well as sufficiently authoritative to guarantee privacy and security, we learnt that having face-to-face meetings and the telling of stories help humanise each side to the other, impeding the tendency to demonise opponents and project sinister motivations on them. After all, in the new era of value pluralism, we cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Unlike the socio-economic issues that continue to dominate much of our local politics, we are seeing more and more disagreement regarding moral and cultural issues for which objective rational consensus is impossible.
In order to negotiate this new politics, we need new democratic tools. The sooner we learn how to talk among ourselves as well as with the authorities in multi-logical processes, the healthier our political space will be. We have to learn how to treat new laws and policies as provisional decisions still open to future challenge, because only then can losing sides have hope for the future and remain justifiably committed to the democratic process instead of using force. We have to learn to agree to disagree and take every loss on the chin, knowing that there will always be a rematch.
These new democratic practices are not perfect, but against a background of irreducible pluralism, they can help reaffirm a unity of purpose where a unity of views is impossible.
•The writer, Johannis Bin Abdul Aziz, was a co-investigator in the Institute of Policy Studies’ 2015-2016 project on The New Singaporean Pluralism. He has a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
– The writer of “Why Does Gay Sex Scare Modern Muslims?” conflates the clear teachings of Islam with the actions of some Muslims. This is what Islamophobes do all the time too.
– To the author Truth is true only when it conforms to the demands of the context, no matter what the context is.To him if Muslims want to be accepted in Europe, Islam must not reject Homosexuality. This is to say that truth is nothing but the product of the context and is subservient to it. In Islam, what is real (reality) is not necessarily true. It is truth that must be made into reality, not the other way round. We should not confuse what is with what ought.
– Fundamentalism in the sense that we should return to the fundamentals of Islam is nothing but good.
– When God said he created this for that purpose, this is what Muslims mean by natural, any kind of action that strayed away from that purpose is considered as an unnatural act, a transgression. Therefore, the very act of consciously turning away from the opposite sex for the same sex to satisfy one’s sexual need – in any way – is explicitly prohibited in The Quran :
“Of all the creatures in the world, you approach the males? And leave those whom Allah has created for you to be your mates? Nay, you are a people of transgression.” (Quran 26:165-166)
How explicit than this do you want the Quran to be?
– The verses quoted above is enough to debunk the “rape theory”.
– Yes, The Quran does not condemn those men who are not in need of women (24:31), but the Quran also does not say that they are in need of men or sanction homosexuality. This is a clear fallacy of Non Sequitur.
– The author seems to necessitate sex in a love relationship between men, with his logic all men who love their fellow men passionately must be homosexuals, to stretch this faulty logic further, it will not be wrong to say that when there is love between a father and his daughter the relationship must be incestuous.
– Linking conservatism with ISIS’ atrocities is a clear example of slippery slope.
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We know that such brittle articles will keep on coming, because if your position is weak, you have nothing to strengthen it with but repetition and paraphrasing.
Since my post rebutting the position of Minister Masagos Zulkifli on the Tudung issue, I have received much support from members of the public, majority of who are Muslims, indicative of the frustration within the community towards the continued disregard of the feelings of the community on the Muslim women being discriminated against. The Muslim community has for many years patiently expressed our collective disapproval of the discriminatory policies within the channels possible in the community as well as via national platforms whenever there was a chance to do so. Each time, the community is left disappointed by the government’s response.
I have personally engaged on the issue even before I decided to join politics by directly being involved with individual efforts within the nursing professions as well as with undergraduate nursing students. These individuals suffered direct discrimination for not being allowed to don the Tudung as a Professional nurse or during practical exams in their Professional Nursing undergraduate program. They have resorted to communicate to the Institutions within the Nursing profession on the matter. These Institutions share the views of the Muslim women nurses on the fact that there is no Professional basis to disallow the Muslim nurses who wishes to put on the Tudung and that the policy that forbid the Muslim women should not continue as it is discriminatory. However their hands are tight to undo the policy.
The government on the other hand has kept repeating the same mantra to justify prolonging the discriminatory policy. It uses the excuse of potential social agitation among races and communities should they change the policy. Each time they only offer anecdotal evidence that highlights the so-called social ramification that worries them. However, this reliance on social scenarios is not in anyway backed by analysis and studies, which interestingly are available on such, related intra-community relations and whose findings points otherwise. (I have referred to 2 such studies done in my earlier posting on the issue) In fact the corresponding implication should the government reason be true means there is a serious problem with the majority community for still maintaining an intolerant, biased and almost negative perception towards other minority communities. Thus a glaring failure of so-called community trust-building initiatives, which wrongly focused on the minority rather than the majority.
Prior to the views of the Minister, which has angered the Muslim community, 3 other Muslim PAP MPs mentioned in their speeches in parliament directly or indirectly echoing the sentiments of the Muslim community on the Tudung issue. Those speeches by the 3 MPs were very much welcomed by the community and were in fact offering much hope that a policy shift seems to be on the card. However sadly, the recent statement made by the Minister directly addressing the community via national TV on the matter was a cruel denial of the desire of the community to see the overdue changes take place. What is most frustrating for the community is the clear reference to non-professional related reasons to justify the policy continuation. Thus it therefore becomes incumbent upon us to scrutinize the validity of the secondary reasons forwarded by the Minister as justification for the government’s position.
The Minister mentioned too the need to ensure that the demands of the Malay/Muslim community on the Tudung be equitably responded in relation to “similar” demands by other communities. In particular he mentioned the LGBT group’s call to repeal the 377A penal code that criminalizes gay sex. Let us look at how accurate it is for the Minister to compare the 2 issues and call for the entire Malay/Muslim community to accept the tradeoff that he implied are a fair and equitable deal.
The Malay/Muslim community call for lifting the Tudung ban on the nursing profession is primarily based on the lack of evidence to support its continuation from a Professional point of view. As mentioned earlier, the Professional nursing body as well as the Medical institutions found no legitimate grounds to justify any ban for nurses to put on the Tudung and perform their nursing role professionally. There are in fact many examples of other majority non-Muslim secular countries in the world that have already allowed Muslim nurses who desire to put on the Tudung to do so. This is simply done by making modification to the uniform of the nurses in hospital to have versions that suited the dressing requirements of Muslim women who wants to put on the Tudung.
The other arguments that the Muslim community put forth to challenge the government is that contrary to what they claim, a women nurse wearing a Tudung and doing her professional role as a nurse in public or private hospital are not seen as undesirable by the majority that may require their nursing services in anyway. While no known surveys were done specifically to enquire about this so-called unhappiness by the majority who happened to encounter a women nurse in Tudung, it would suffice to draw some ideas about the most likely outcome of such a survey, by opening our eyes to observe what kind of social attitudes do the majority of people, especially non-Muslim have towards other Muslim women in Tudung that are currently employed in Medical facilities such as Nursing attendants and Doctors. To date, we are unaware of any untoward incidences or complaints made on any such Muslim women in Medical facilities already allowed to wear the Tudung, especially those that are professionally related.
Thus based on the 2 reasons forwarded above, one on Professional grounds and the other on social grounds, the government’s position is untenable. Then we have the curious reason of the wider implication on harmony should the government be seen to be uneven-handed towards specifically the LGBT community if they agree to submit to the demands of the Muslim community by allowing the Muslim women to wear Tudung as nurses. Lets us analyze this strange logic. To impose an equitable clause would require the comparison to be of equal merit, which in the case of the Tudung and the LGBT are a real stretch.
The Tudung ban for nursing are professionally and socially unjustified as they are, on both grounds invalid arguments as explained and evidenced clearly above. The demand by the Muslim community for a policy change on the Tudung ban for the nursing profession stands on its own merit. For the case of the LBGT, on both medical and social grounds there are reasons to keep the law even though the law essentially is irrelevant as gay sex can easily take place in the privacy of hotels and homes and it is only a criminal offense when it is reported which seems most unlikely as they would have mostly been done in private by consenting adults. The only likelihood of any possible penal case would be if a public arrest was made for such an act in public and that criminal offense applies to both gay and straight sex. Thus to compare the Tudung case to the LGBT case clearly shows that they are not similar. Before the LGBT group protest, let me state clearly that the above explanation in no way intended to disrespect the LGBT group, the example is used only because it was raised as a comparison by the learned Minister.
Putting the 2 issues by the Minister as comparable cases worthy of tradeoff is clearly a bad call. A like and like analysis above goes to show how unlike and unlike the 2 issues are. Inevitably we have to wonder what other hidden reasons there is, which makes the government so reluctant to change and remain intransigent on the Tudung issue.
For the Malay/Muslim community, this continued refusal to explain clearly and honestly inevitably could only imply that the government itself do not wish to allow Tudung to be worn by nurses or any other uniformed services for reasons that it continues to hide behind the notion of sensitivity. This prolonged silence and elusiveness are unhealthy as it only invites speculations on the part of the Malay/Muslim community as well as other communities as to what could be the probable reason. Worst of all it conveys a subtle but demeaning message of arrogance and distrust on the part of the government in dealing with a minority community. Above all, the continuation of this ban for Tudung on the nursing profession is ultimately discriminatory towards Muslim women and the Muslim community as a whole.
The above suffice for now as additions to my earlier post in response to the Minister. I offer more clarity to my initial posting in order to avoid any potential misunderstanding from anyone who may instead of dealing with my arguments, once again chooses to adopt the conventional ‘we know better coz we are the government’ approach which is not in the spirit of openness that our President and the Prime Minister have clearly highlighted as their preferred ways for this newly elected government during their recent speeches in Parliament. Majulah Singapura!!!
