Actress Ding Ning (丁寧) has lost an endorsement deal after expressing support for same-sex marriage.
The 43-year-old, who has starred in several TV dramas and films, said in a Facebook posting on Tuesday that an endorsement deal with a company she did not name was canceled after she participated in a rally in Taipei on Saturday in support of same-sex marriage.
“I saw this coming,” Ding wrote, referring to a backlash.
A number of Facebook users voiced their support for Ding, who had posted several messages in support of gay marriage on the Web site over the past few weeks.
In a post on Saturday, Ding wrote that she had not planned to take to the streets to support gay marriage, but changed her mind after hearing comments on TV opposing an amendment to legalize same-sex marriage.
“I was sad and angry. I always thought we were very democratic, but now I see it is only a democracy for heterosexual people. If you are different from us, you cannot enjoy it,” Ding said.
A publicist from the agency that represents Ding said it was not worried more firms might follow suit.
The publicist declined to name the company, saying “we do not want to cause it trouble,” but confirmed that the endorsement had to do with a parent and child product.
Ding is pregnant with her second child.
The incident is the latest in a string of controversies that have surfaced since a draft amendment to legalized same-sex marriage and allow married gay couples to adopt children cleared a first reading in the Legislative Yuan in October.
The bill has to make it through two more readings before it can become law.
Actress and singer Amber Kuo (郭采潔) posted a comment on Facebook last month that called the proposal “worrying.”
Her comment infuriated supporters of the proposal and spurred a debate over same-sex marriage.
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated against same-sex marriage on Saturday, while supporters countered with their own much smaller rally.
Victoria Hsu (許秀雯), president of the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights, which launched the amendment proposal, said major polls in Taiwan in recent years have shown that about 50 percent of the population supports same-sex marriage.
She thanked Ding and called on the public to respect people with different sexual orientations.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan