Faith (Part 1)

Ohaiyo :) I got no pithy quotes on Faith, unfortunately. Especially Faith in the context of this mini-anthology of Hope, Faith and Love. (1 Corinthians 13:13, Bible.)

Religious faith however can be discussed in a tangential manner - today we write about homosexuality instead. Aaron had a hot discussion over at his blog a few days back, and Ben and Kitana had weighed in earlier as well, with Ben rounding up the discussion just this weekend.

This is one of my favourite topics of all time, and I wrote a short paper on it last November when the Penal Code amendments public consultation sessions were still going strong. Acknowledgment: Much of the inspiration for the paper has to be credited to Yawning Bread [1], where I first saw the New Jersey case.


Gay Marriages and Civil Unions – the Singapore Context

1. Overview

The issue of whether gay marriage should be legislated for first garnered worldwide attention when the then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom declared in 2004 that gay marriage was a fundamental human right and proceeded to sign marriage licenses for gay couples without any concern or regard for the legal repercussions of those documents. Since then the state of Massachusetts in the United States has legalized gay marriage while the states of Vermont and Connecticut have legalized civil unions.

The case of Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris etc. et al. (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 2006) indicated two main points of contention in the legislation for or against gay marriages and, more broadly, civil unions between same-sex couples: 1. the right to marry, and 2. the rights of marriage. The right to marry was the right that Gavin Newsom was asserting by his brashly independent action. The rights of marriage are those that are already accorded to heterosexual couples when they marry, in the country they choose the marriage to take place in, as well as any other countries who have pledged to honour extraterritorial marriage contracts. The situation of a country refusing to honour an extraterritorial gay marriage has thus far not been reported.

In this paper I discuss whether civil unions or gay marriages can be legalized in Singapore, and the steps that can be taken to achieve social legitimization of such partnerships. Towards this end a literature review is timely.

2. Marriage

It is well-known that the traditional definition of marriage specifies that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, in a clear example of heterosexual privilege. The Constitution of Singapore specifies in its equal protection clause under Part IV: Fundamental Liberties that no discrimination against Singapore citizens can be effected based on religion, race, descent or place of birth; both sexual orientation and sexual identity are notably absent from this clause and from any other part of the Constitution. Section 377 of the Penal Code of Singapore criminalizes carnal intercourse ‘against the order of nature’. Marriage as specified in the Women’s Charter of Singapore is restricted to the traditional definition only.

However a recent New Jersey case brought before the state Supreme Court in February 2006 described seven same-sex couples being in a permanent committed relationship for more than ten years, some having children and grandchildren through the reproductive method of artificial insemination. The family lives of these seven couples are briefly summarized in the case (pp. 8-12) as “being remarkably similar to opposite-sex couples”. Allen and Demo also describe in a meta-review (1995) [2] similar functioning families with same-sex parents and constructively criticize the prevalence of negative case same-sex family studies over positive ones in the field of family research. There exists therefore empirical evidence that same-sex families are not a priori dysfunctional.

3. Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders (LGBT)

As part of a prospective longitudinal study on the upstream-downstream relationships between past temporal orientation, long-term distress and temporal disintegration in a California population after a firestorm event, Holman and Silver (1998) [3] reported significantly higher levels of immediate temporal disintegration in individuals who had had direct experience with chronic trauma prior to the fires, compared with individuals who had instead directly experienced prior acute trauma, p < 0.05, and in their Discussion they acknowledged that “the role of temporal disintegration in response to chronic forms of trauma remains unexplored” (p. 1158). Temporal disintegration is cited and defined therein (p. 1151) as “confusing day and time, narrowing attention to the present, perceiving oneself to be in slow motion, feeling as though time itself has stopped, confusing the order of events experienced, experiencing a sense of timelessness, feeling fragmentation in the continuity between past and present, and having a foreshortened or obliterated sense of the future”. How this is applicable to the LGBT sector is that one’s sexuality is not only chronic, it is constant. And it can be traumatic to ‘come out’ to declare and maintain one’s alternative sexual orientation in the face of societal disapproval, as seen in Price (2001) [4] and Vaughan (1999)’s [5] studies on homosexual women.

In Singapore, homosexuality is still very much painted as a social taboo, as evidenced by frequent association of drugs and crime with homosexuality in the daily mainstream broadsheet The Straits Times, and the government’s reluctance to remove or amend section 377A (pertaining to all sexual contact between men) of the Singapore Penal Code during the ongoing public feedback discussion of extensive proposed Penal Code amendments. Such pandering to the homophobic ‘conservative Singaporean majority’ (no demographics data available) is highlighted in the quote below from a ChannelNewsAsia article on 8 November 2006 [6] by Ms Ellen Lee, a member of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Home Affairs and Law.

“I think the general feel is that we're still not ready to introduce major changes in these areas. … It's not necessarily [sic] for major legislative change to signal changes. But the legislation will only be changed when there is sufficient justification to warrant it, because the larger section of society [sic] think that it's time for those changes to take place.”

– Ms Ellen Lee

From a humanistic perspective [7], this resistance to ending open prejudice and discrimination could hardly be affirming to the homosexual person. Given that 'risk and resilience' literature emphasizes risk factors and protective factors [8], the taboo of homosexuality in the mainstream media and high echelons of government, without balancing effects from civic pro-LGBT organisations, could make homosexuality in itself a risk factor for living in Singapore.

4. Summary

Although the ground for gay marriages and civil unions may not be fertile in Singapore at this moment in time, there exists hope that greater social acceptance of non-heterosexual Singaporeans will eventually be supported bureaucratically. This will be elaborated further in my analysis.

References

[1] Au, A 2006, ‘New Jersey court orders legislature to provide for same-sex unions’, <http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2006/yax-670.htm>

[2] Allen, KR & Demo, DH 1995, ‘The families of lesbians and gay men: a new frontier in family research’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 111-127.

[3] Holman, AE & Silver, RC 1998, ‘Getting “stuck” in the past: temporal orientation and coping with trauma’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 74, no. 5, pp. 1146-1163.

[4] Price, MF 2001, ‘Early trauma, societal oppression and coming out’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 59 (abstract only).

[5] Vaughan, SC 1999, ‘The hiding and revelation of sexual desire in lesbians: the lasting legacy of developmental traumas’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 81 (abstract only).

[6] Ng, J 2006, ‘Penal Code review to add protection for minors, flexibility for judges’, ChannelNewsAsia, 8 November 2006. <http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/240179/1/.html>

[7] The humanistic perspective, in brief, states that each person is unique and has value, that each person is responsible for the choices he or she makes within the limits of freedom, that people always have the capacity to change themselves, and that human behaviour is driven by a desire for growth, personal meaning, and competence, and by a need to experience a bond with others. Source is Hutchison, ED & Charlesworth, LW 2003, ‘Theoretical perspectives on human behaviour’, in ED Hutchison (ed.), Dimensions of human behaviour: person and environment, 2nd edn, Sage Publications, CA.

[8] Hutchison, ED 2003, ‘A life course perspective’, in ED Hutchison (ed.), Dimensions of human behaviour: the changing life course, 2nd edn, Sage Publications, CA.