Last year marked the beginning of a new age of terror and total moral control, gender and sexuality rights activists said yesterday as they announced the top 10 gender and sexuality rights news items of 2009.
“Over the past few years when we announced the top 10 gender and sexuality news items of the year, we’ve warned that gender and sexuality rights are on the decline in this country,” Gender/Sexuality Rights Association Taiwan secretary-general Wang Ping (王蘋) told a news conference. “But for the year [2009], we must say that the moralists are in total control.”
The top 10 news items that the activists chose for 2009 included the National Communications Commission’s (NCC) intervention over the contents of TV commercials and a video clip broadcast by a local news channel.
Earlier this year, the NCC voiced concerns over two TV commercials in which actresses wore outfits that showed off their cleavage. Later, the NCC sent a letter to a news channel urging it not to show part of a news video clip in which two men kissed, saying that it would “cause confusion in moral values” and “have a negative impact on the psychological development of children and juveniles.”
Other news items picked by the activists included an anti-gay parade organized by several Christian churches and organizations, media outlets’ digging into the love life of the unmarried Rebecca Sun (孫仲瑜) after her affair with married Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) and the Ministry of National Defense’s punishment of a female soldier who posted a picture of herself wearing underwear on her Facebook page.
“It seems like if you don’t like something that someone does, you only need to say that such an act damages the image of the military, damages a family, objectifies the female body or has a negative impact on children and juveniles’ mental development,” Wang said. “Then the state — or someone else — rushes to hunt down the people who did something they don’t like.”
“It’s quite ironic that ‘objectifying the female body’ — a term that feminists used to criticize restraints forced onto women by tradition or moral codes — is now used by moralists to suppress [women’s] gender and sexuality rights,” she said, adding that everyone has the right to show off his or her body.
Wang Hao-zhong (王顥中), a member of gay rights organization All My Gay, panned some churches and Christian organizations for using God’s love as an excuse to launch a purge on gay Christians.
“They say that God loves everyone including gays, and that’s why they want to ‘correct’ the ‘mistaken’ love of gays,” Wang said. “This has nothing to do with love — it’s religious repression that will only spark more discrimination against homosexuals.”
National Central University’s Center for the Study of Sexualities professor Josephine Ho (何春蕤) voiced concern that more groups are using the Children and Juveniles Welfare Act (兒童及青少年福利法) to block the legal rights of adults to receive certain information.
Several children and juveniles welfare groups are pushing to amend the law to completely ban news reports that give too many details on sexual offenses, violent crimes and suicides in print media.
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