Letter: Rhetoric vs civil liberties

(publication link)

As published:

JULY 11 — The last week in Malaysia: well winter is here again, and I can’t see my toes for snowflakes. On the table:

i. Appointment of queers to public office
ii. Child marriage
iii. Deportation of religious scholars/ figures based on their theological positions.

Once again the screaming, weeping, liberals have called for elected leaders to disrupt the cultural predilections of the religious right. However, the left forgets or ignores a few things in their public effort:

1. Our leaders are elected, and the electorate is (for better or for worse) composed of religious conservatives. Therefore what the left asks for is, essentially undemocratic in at least one interpretation of approach. Moreover, even if it is democratic in some interpretation, our elected leaders lack the ability to secure both their mandates from the religious right and left, and have been forced in their decades-long policy of binomial panic to fall to the right.

2. This isn’t to say that the right should be let loose to abscond with universal liberties. Rather, the left again targets the wrong crowd. The road to justice and equality among people of different preferences doesn’t lie with the law — laws are often remade or broken. The road lies in diligent persuasion of the masses that their targeted policies (* Note 1) are the right policies. It is to the expensive and thankless proselytisation of the grassroots via slow, daily, programs where focus must return — not from remote locations, but in communities on the ground.

Meanwhile the left can proceed to call out the panicked leaders of the federal government, while no one provides an operational solution. This is valid exercise of speech freedoms, but it does not seem to be a effective rhetoric: it is not persuasive.

I’m looking forward to more strategic grassroots efforts. These require some humility and tolerance of hate, as you can’t easily persuade a hateful person to analyse their motivations for hate unless you are able to first demonstrate empathy with their outrage. Good luck, high five... on we go, Malaysians.

* Note 1:
Having queers in public office, unifying the age-of-qualification for the civil liberties of [marriage, voting, vice], and the enactment of public policy that explicitly delineates guidelines for the classification of ethical positions (and thereafter their inclusion or exclusion from federal funding or other endorsement).