By Leroy Luar
Dear God no! NO!
Can you imagine the horror of this? If you haven’t heard, the ‘Pastor’ Au Yong has announced his intentions of marrying, marrying –the cheek of them to defile this holy institution merely to justify their profane act of depravity- his partner Phineas Newborn III, 47, a Broadway musical producer.
While some people are more than happy to congratulate the happy couple, more than a few have stepped out against this abomination and rightly so! Why on earth would a man declare his love for another man and call that a marriage when we know that doing so will set off a whole chain of social ills that will eventually wreck the fabric of our society?
Take for instance the ramifications of such an institution on the sanctity of conventional marriage.
By God, if the good pastor were allowed to marry his partner, a precedent allowing this sort of union will be set and what would that do for all other marriages? I’m warning you, our fathers will be rushing to divorce out mothers for the very next man they see on the street. Divorce rates will skyrocket and you know we simply cannot have so many immoral divorcees wandering the streets to test and corrupt other marriages. Gay marriage, I blame you.
In a strongly worded comment by the wise and much celebrated column written by one Awang Selamat, he stressed that Malaysian society’s value system based on religious tolerance could not be compromised. “Malaysian gay pastor Ou Yang Wen Feng’s attempt to break this value system to marry the same gender in this country has to be opposed. Day by day we see various attempts to destroy our value system and Pastor Ou is doing it in the open.”
Damn right it is! If we allow our society to allow man to marry man in the name of liberalism, would it not open the floodgates for requests to legitimise other acts of depravity? Acts including the sexual abuse of minors by people in positions of trust, underaged marriage and even –I can’t bear to say this but I must- incest? Gay marriage, I blame you.
And don’t even get me started on what this marriage is going to do to the traditional institution of family. A family must have a Father, a Mother and their children. That is the rule. With Man marrying Man, how can there possibly be enough men to go around for women-kind to share?
Believe you me, if this depravity is allowed to proceed, there will be a catastrophic rise in the number of single parent families and we all know families like these do nothing more than breed juvenile delinquents. Gay marriage, I blame you.
Oh, in a world where one man is allowed to marry another out of love, what hope is there for us but the sure and irreversible slide of humanity into doom and destruction? We’ve read about Sodom and Gomorrah. We’ve read of the destruction of great ancient civilisations as divine retribution for their pederasty and general morally corrupt decadence. I will know who to blame the next time Rapture comes around. Gay marriage, again I blame you.
Sarcastic disdain aside, I’ve raised only one question in response to this issue many a time before and I’ll raise it again: is acceptance really such a childish concept? When did we stop celebrating our differences and begin qualifying them instead?
So yes, even though we have much bigger fish to fry (take your pick: we’ve got the mud-coloured fish of racism, the green fish of corrupted politics, the yellow fish of electoral reforms… to name but a few swimming in local waters these days), let’s focus on frying this rainbow-hued fish of tolerance if only to prove the already obvious point that we simply do not know where our priorities lie.
If it is the decay of morality one is ultimately wary of, then I think it is necessary for one to consider this: compassion IS the basis of morality. Anyone can criticise, spew fire, brimstone and condemnation but for society to truly progress, acceptance and tolerance is key.
At the end of it all, accepting; if not championing, marriage equality will simply mean that two people; never mind their gender and what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, get to legitimise their love for each other and celebrate their relationship with the person of their choice.
And if you do not agree with the idea of gay marriage, simply don’t marry a gay person. What could possibly be harder than that?