Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) vice presidential candidate Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), a Catholic, yesterday said that he respects the right of everyone — including homosexuals — to pursue happiness.
“The Lord loves everyone; so he loves homosexuals,” Chen said.
“Pope Francis said: ‘If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?’” Chen said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Therefore I also believe that gays have the right to pursue happiness and we should respect that right,” he said.
However, Chen said that since same-sex relations involves a change to society, the issue of marriage “needs deeper discussion before a decision is made.”
Chen spoke following his first attendance at a DPP weekly Central Standing Committee meeting.
Chen said an accusation by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that he was involved in plagiarism was negative campaigning, but added that he did not expect it to start so soon.
A day after DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) announced Chen as her running mate on Monday, KMT legislators Alicia Wang (王育敏), Alex Tsai (蔡正元) and former KMT legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) made the accusation of plagiarizm in a press conference at the KMT caucus office, saying that Chen Chien-jen and National Taiwan University (NTU) Hospital physician Chen Kuan-yu (陳冠宇) and NTU president Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池), co-authored a paper in 2007 and submitted it to the international medical periodical Cancer, but was returned because there was plagiarism involved.
Chen denied the accusation, saying that it was only a problem involving quotation, not plagiarism, adding that after a revision, the paper was resubmitted and was published.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS