Oct 13th, 2007
The fallacy of polling as support for retaining S377A
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The follow comment was left by Gerald in a comment on The Online Citizen in response to an article by Michael Hor:
The learned professor has gone into great depths to explain that acts prohibited under S377A are not harmful to society. Social conservatives, myself included, would argue that they are. Both of these are moral stands (Yes, even the liberal stance is a moral stand which is no more rational than the conservative stance.)
Since we are living in a democracy, not a theocracy, it is only natural that our laws to take a stand based on the will of the majority of voters. Consistently, every poll that has been done on Singaporean adults indicates that homosexual acts are still not acceptable to the majority. Even if a referendum on repealing S377A were to be conducted tomorrow, voters will still vote to retain it.
Some have argued that since 377A is not enforced, why have it. They have missed the point and intent of this piece of legislation. 377A is a form of “signposting” — a symbol and indicator of our society’s values (based on the values of the majority). Just like the MDA’s symbolic blocking of 100 pornographic websites.
So until our society’s social values take a sharp turn to the left in the coming years, we can expect S377A to remain, notwithstanding valiant attempts by the gay lobby to have it overturned.
I respect Gerald for stating upfront that he is a social conservative. It makes it much easier for me to see where he’s coming from. I don’t think he said anything wrong when he cited polls as having consistently indicated homosexual acts as unacceptable. However, I think that he forgot to consider the way the poll was conducted, as well as the way the questions were framed.
As a communications scholar wannabe, I am quite sensitive to the issue of framing. The same topic can possibly elicit different kinds of responses, depending on how the question was phrased. Perhaps some examples would illustrate my point. Consider your response to the following questions:
1. Do you think that homosexuality is natural?
2. Do you think that homosexuals deserve the same set of rights as heterosexuals?
3. Do you agree that homosexuals should be discriminated against?
It is my belief that in Singapore’s context, the social conservative would probably answer no to the first question while the liberal would say yes. For the second question, I think that a fair number of conservatives who said no to the first question are going to yes because it’s no longer about homosexuality. It’s about the rights of a human being. As for the last question, I think except for the extreme hawks, most social conservatives are going to disagree with discriminating against homosexuals. I do believe that in Singapore, people (and the government) are very sensitive to the term “discrimination”, given our history with racial and religious violence in the early days of independence.
I don’t want to be a wet blanket but for the social conservatives, before taking out numbers to support your argument, you might want to consider whether the instrument (i.e. the polls) was biased to begin with. Also, I think the social conservatives might want to make up their own minds as to what is it exactly that they are against. Homosexuality and human rights are two different issues.
I consider myself a liberal but I am homophobic. I don’t think that homosexuality is all that natural. But so what? That doesn’t diminish their status as a human being. I think homosexuals should enjoy the same set of sexual rights as me, a heterosexual, because homosexuals are every inch a human being as I am. The issue here is not the sexual orientation but rather equality of rights among human beings. On what basis is a homosexual less human than a heterosexual?
While I do respect the views of the conservatives in general, I dislike how they are framing the debate over S377A as an issue of whether homosexuality is natural or unnatural, rather than whether homosexuals deserve the same set of rights as heterosexuals. It is way too complex to determine whether homosexuality is natural or unnatural. There are many conflicting evidences, so on this note, I say let’s apply the rule of innocence unless proven guilty and take the nature versus nurture debate over homosexuality out of the debate.
So, the two critical questions the social conservatives should answer are:
1. Do you think that homosexuals deserve the same set of rights as heterosexuals?
2. Do you agree that homosexuals should be discriminated against?
Note: Please check out http://www.repeal377a.com/ and sign the open letter if you think the legislation is unfair. I’ve already done so in my capacity as a concerned Singapore citizen.
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Hi aaron,
When you say “I don’t think that homosexuality is all that natural.”, i take it that you mean that the environment has a significant influence on the sexuality of a person.
I wonder if you would change your opinion on that after reading this http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0900web/babes.html
It’s an article on how a group of male infants born with developmental disoders of their reproductive organs and were surgically converted into females due to the relative ease of constructing a vagina compared to a penis.
Years later when these children grew up, brought up as girls all their lives, all of them invariable were attracted to females.
How would you interpret this?
Whether it is natural or not is actually quite irrelevant. Social conservatives can try trotting out all kinds of arguments against repeal but there is not a single respectable, logical or coherent one.
With regards to the “democracy” argument, there is an even greater slippery slope that no one notices.
If offence or the will of the majority is all it takes to strip the rights of a minority, then surely we are all saying that it is ok for theocratic societies to forcibly convert people of other religions, or to destroy their religious buildings and artefacts.
This of course has been done before in certain countries. Do we think that this is ok as long as it is the will of the majority?
Slightly off-track comment…
I was just wondering: what happened to that earlier post of yours about the NTU study on attitudes towards homosexuality?
Han,
Whether it is natural or not may not be of much relevance towards the argument for repealing S377A but it is of relevance towards getting rid of the social stigma attached to homosexuals.
In a country where the people are so obsessed with sexual issues would usually mean they themselves have issues with sex in their lives. This somehow ‘dirty feelings’ about sex are often passed down by their grannies who wear tiny shoes if you know what i mean? haha.
For being such ‘moralistic conservative’ creatures, they sure enjoy poking their noses into other people’s sex lives. Kind of…porno to me leh haha =)
i think another question is, “what can straight people do for gay people?”
straight people are privileged, and the privileged will not be discriminated against, ostracised, marginalised, have hate speech directed at them.
377A is a symbol of the privileged wanting to stamp its ideas and ideals onto a minority community, telling them who and how to love. it disrespects private and consensual acts of love among gay men. why are we straight people wanting to dictate how gay men should love? it is their business.
and because it is their business, we all should respect that. repealing 377A is a sign of us respecting their space. they never invaded our space, which is a huge huge space. so why should we be invading theirs?
the values of the church only apply to believers who chose to live in such a community of love. subsequently, any problems faced by these believers should be resolved best through their community. those who choose to live ‘outside of the community’ will have to deal with their chosen values - best is to give them the space to experiment with their chosen values. it is as simple as that.
unfortunately, we don’t have the space like in ….America.
It’s great that you’re writing this, Aaron.
I must be stupid:
I refrain from discussions about whether homosexuality is natural because it firstly, I do not have the expertise to adequately discuss it, secondly, I find that arguments from this angle are actually easily open to attack, and thirdly, I do not believe in social engineering to make people like gays.
People have a right whether to like or to hate gays, I do not believe in thought control. It only matters that those thoughts do not manifest themselves as unjust laws.
Further, in saying that things should be allowed only if they are “natural” leads one down the difficult path of trying to distinguish between what is “natural” and what is not. You will be playing into the hands of homophobes if you go down this path.
A simple argument is the strongest: your body is your own to do with as you wish. This means that private consensual acts between adults that are freely chosen is an expression of individual free will. Governments exist to protect the choices that individuals make for themselves, and correspondingly, criminal laws are created for the purpose of punishing those who subvert the free will of others.
For this reason, we punish people who murder, rape, steal or defraud. We punish people who take the life of another without consent. We punish people who invade the bodies of another without consent. We punish people who take the property of another with consent. We punish fraudulent behaviour because deception invalidates consent.
There is no moral basis for punishing consenting adults having sex in private, simply because some people disagree with those acts.
They say, behind every powerful man, there is this quiet little powerful old lady. Whether she is Eve or Jezebel. you have to decide. But one thing is for sure. She is the one who tells her young ” don’t touch there, it is dirty”. So he grows up obsessed with ‘cleanliness’ or become a control freak. She? She grows up always being the ‘victim’ or ‘abused’. And when you flip through the pages daily and wonder who writes those stuffs, you understand why this country has become a shame society.
You then realized the powerful man is really not the vocal one. Jezebel rules!
Han,
As i have said, whether homosexuality has a genetic basis or is congenital has nothing much to do with the abolishment of S377A. From what i know, the scientific evidence out there is very much toward the stand that environment has almost nil influence on the sexuality of a person.
As such, it would be useful to educate others on this facet of homosexuality. People tend to have a tendency to think “natural is good”. It’s more of a pragmatic approach for if you aruge with the “conservative majority” on philosophical grounds, you can do so till the cows come home before you can convince them. After all if people could think like you, they wouldn’t be discriminating against homosexuals in the first place.
Finally, if you admit that you don’t have the expertise to discuss the biological basis for homosexuality, isn’t it contradictary that you say it is very susceptible to attack?
Han, ‘I must be stupid’:
If I may attempt to paraphrase, both of you are in support of the repeal of section 377A, and both of you do acknowledge each other’s point of view except that the emphasis is a little different.
Now let me argue my own interpretation of events.
‘I must be stupid’, in using the argument that homosexuality is natural, is in effect saying that homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality is and should be accorded equal protection, insofar as the decriminalization of homosexual consenting activity is concerned. This is very similar to Han’s path of directly according homosexual activity equal non-criminalization.
Both arguments can be refuted in the ways the two of you have already extensively explored in these comments. In beginning with the premise that homosexuality is natural, ‘I must be stupid’ opens his argument to attack from the side which says that homosexuality is not natural. It is time-consuming and restricted to those with academic access probably both biological and sociological knowledge to do a full literature review of whether homosexuality is natural or not. This may perhaps be what Han means when he says that he does not have the expertise to fully discuss whether homosexuality is natural or not, and yet can declare with full certainty that it is very susceptible to attack. Admittedly, for the person who has never encountered gay people and wonders if they will turn him/her gay or some such ridiculous thing, the idea that homosexuality is natural takes care of that particular fear. This line of argument is easy to relate to.
In beginning with the premise that homosexuals should be accorded equal protection, which is the final concluding statement of ‘I must be stupid’’s argument, Han argues a more complex concept of social justice and the coercive power of government. One can consider something to be vastly immoral, but that is not sufficient reason to make that something universally punishable by force in the highest public spheres i.e. government and judiciary. It is the misuse of the coercive power of government and judiciary that is the key point of this argument. That is essentially what Han is arguing. This line of argument isn’t as easy to relate to as the first, but I personally would agree with it more. I am straight, and began in this area of gay rights not knowing anything at all, whether gayness was ‘contagious’, or whether it was ‘natural’ or a ‘lifestyle’, that kind of thing. It took me some time to get past those factors and begin to consider the intrinsic humanity of our gay people as not just gays, but people. I have been considering the argument about human rights and about coercive power of government for some years now, but I did not begin that way.
Both your arguments have truth and merit in them, but in different ways.
(I have to re-post this because I can’t edit the comment successfully)
Han, ‘I must be stupid’:
If I may attempt to paraphrase, both of you are in support of the repeal of section 377A, and both of you do acknowledge each other’s point of view except that the emphasis is a little different.
Now let me argue my own interpretation of events.
‘I must be stupid’, in using the argument that homosexuality is natural, is in effect saying that homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality is and should be accorded equal protection, insofar as the decriminalization of homosexual consenting activity is concerned. This is very similar to Han’s path of directly according homosexual activity equal non-criminalization.
Both arguments can be refuted in the ways the two of you have already extensively explored in these comments. In beginning with the premise that homosexuality is natural, ‘I must be stupid’ opens his argument to attack from the side which says that homosexuality is not natural. It is time-consuming and restricted to those with academic access probably both biological and sociological knowledge to do a full literature review of whether homosexuality is natural or not. This may perhaps be what Han means when he says that he does not have the expertise to fully discuss whether homosexuality is natural or not, and yet can declare with full certainty that it is very susceptible to attack. Admittedly, for the person who has never encountered gay people and wonders if they will turn him/her gay or some such ridiculous thing, the idea that homosexuality is natural takes care of that particular fear. This line of argument is easy to relate to.
In beginning with the premise that homosexuals should be accorded equal protection, which is the final concluding statement of ‘I must be stupid’’s argument, Han argues a more complex concept of social justice and the coercive power of government. One can consider something to be vastly immoral, but that is not sufficient reason to make that something universally punishable by force in the highest public spheres i.e. government and judiciary. It is the misuse of the coercive power of government and judiciary that is the key point of this argument. That is essentially what Han is arguing. This line of argument isn’t as easy to relate to as the first, but I personally would agree with it more. I am straight, and began in this area of gay rights not knowing anything at all, whether gayness was ‘contagious’, or whether it was ‘natural’ or a ‘lifestyle’, that kind of thing. It took me some time to get past those factors and begin to consider the intrinsic humanity of our gay people as not just gays, but people. I have been considering the argument about human rights and about coercive power of government for some years now, but I did not begin that way.
Both your arguments have truth and merit in them, but in different ways.
(how come the comments box doesn’t accept line breaks (br) or paragraphing (p, /p))
cognitivedissonance,
Actually all i was trying to do was rebutt aaron’s statement “I don’t think that homosexuality is all that natural.”.
I repeat again that this is not intended to be used as an argument to repeal S377A. No where in my earlier comment did I mention using “homosexual is natural” as an argument to repeal S377A.
You all are probably reading too much into it
Besides, I do realise that a trait being natural has nothing to do with the legality of an act. Otherwise everyone ought to be allowed to run on the streets naked! (We are born without clothes)
The reason why I tired to highlight the point that homosexuality is natural is only to take away some of the social stigma attached to them for being “unnatural weirdos” as well as the repulsion that some have for them.
Once again, i repeat that I’m not using this to argue for the abolishment of S377A.
I must be stupid,
Your link provides a good justification for homosexuality being something that’s “natural”. I do believe that nature has a role to play but I think I need more evidence to believe that environmental conditioning has NO role to play. Ultimately though, as Han has pointed out, it doesn’t matter whether I agree that homosexuality is natural or not. Natural or otherwise, it doesn’t justify treating a fellow human being differently. I don’t believe that a beggar, a roadsweeper, a black, a Christian, a handicapped, a cabinet minister or a millionaire should have different rights. It is this spirit I am applying when I argue against a repeal of 377A, which I think is extremely discriminatory as it targets not just homosexuals, but MALE homosexuals.
Congnitive Dissonance,
It’s a problem with the theme. I cannot do line breaks myself either. I might change the theme when I do an upgrade of my blog engine in a couple of weeks.
LCC,
I realised I wasn’t able to construct a proper argument, so I decided against publishing. I also need more information on the exact way the study was carried out as well. Being too presumptuous isn’t a good idea.
Aaron,
Don’t you think that after decades of social conditioning to have those born as males but converted to females shortly after birth to be attracted to males and yet have all of them to remain attracted to females nonetheless is conclusive evidence that nurture has got nothing to do with sexuality?
I mean how much more can you influence a male to be attracted to another male?
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Ahem. Elsewhere I have already demonstrated that the survey results on the public’s views on homosexuality in fact show that homosexuality SHOULD be decriminalised.
http://mrwangsaysso.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-homosexuality-should-be.html