Groups supporting and opposing the recently proposed same-sex marriage bill engaged in a heated debate at a public hearing held to discuss the proposed amendment to the country’s civil code hosted by legislators in Taipei yesterday.
The proposed amendments, which would entail the legalization of same-sex marriage, include the neutralization of terms that are used to refer to marrying couples, spouses and parents.
The opposing side cited “traditional family institutions and values” and “public order and morals” as basis of their objection to the change, with a lawyer surnamed Ren (任), from the Alliance of Taiwan Religious Groups for the Protection of Family saying that the laws that are designed for the “normal” should not be forced to apply to those who are “peculiar.”
Photo: Hsieh Wen-hua, Taipei Times
A mother said she was worried about the education her children would receive in school if the bill is passed, citing a case in the US in which a father who refused to have his child taught sex education classes was ordered to stay away from the school.
“I don’t want to be the next parent who cannot protect their child from this kind of education,” she said, adding that the annual Taipei gay pride parade, with marchers wearing “weird clothing,” was “wrecking good morals.”
Another religious member of the alliance said that countries that have legalized same-sex marriage are “those that already have a fragmented marriage system and a high percentage of children born out of wedlock, whereas Taiwan still values marriage and family systems, with a very low rate, about 3 percent, of children born outside of wedlock.”
On the other hand, groups supporting the passage of the bill said that the right to marry is a basic human right which is not to be arbitrarily denied based on a person’s sexual orientation.
They called on people to learn from the US’ period of racial segregation, when African Americans were also said to have rights to education and to using public facilities, but “just that they had to ride in the back of the bus and be educated separately from the white children.”
Lin Shih-fang (林實芳), a lawyer from the Awakening Foundation, said laws are made to direct and reshape what used to be considered acceptable, such as polygyny.
National Chengchi University’s associate professor of psychology I-Ching Lee (李怡青) said that various studies have shown that gay couples are better at conflict-solving and their children are less bound by gender stereotypes and biases, “that, according to studies, can contribute to poorly developed psychological states.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater