Doesn’t the Liaison Office have enough to do?

As the annual Pride march took place over the weekend, Hong Kong’s anti-LGBT forces spoke out.

The fundamentalist Christian/fundamentally gruesome Truth and Light Society repeated its opposition to legal recognition of transgender people’s adopted gender, now accepted in many (notably Western) countries. And a pro-establishment Liberal Party local politician freaked out over a foreign plot to force gay marriage onto Hong Kong after the British consulate flew a rainbow flag. (The Standard’s layout people wittily-perhaps put the story on a pink background.)

For most of Hong Kong, this is fringe stuff. In the West, the transgender issue has become absurd – see the bathroom-war sagas in the US. Radical activists themselves can’t get their heads around it (the TERF thing), and the whole subject of gender identity could use a serious dose of science. But beneath all the hoo-hah is a reality not a curable ailment. Meanwhile, gay marriage has gone from being unthinkable and outlandish to a big snore in open-minded societies.

The key thing is that in Hong Kong (as elsewhere) a fairly small but loud group of people insist that any expansion of LGBT rights somehow oppresses the straight majority, while an unknown number of more tolerant people disagree or simply don’t care much.

The anti-LGBT movement in Hong Kong clearly has religious roots. Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s panicky I’m-a-Catholic non-commitment over the Gay Games is an example. And it’s no secret that fundamentalist Protestants have had a growing influence in the education sector and civil service over the years (trying to push creationism and gay-conversion therapy, for example). We also know that there is a political overlap (the Devil’s handiwork, indeed) between the fundamentalist Christian and pro-Beijing forces.

As well as activists, the pro-LGBT lobby includes the (otherwise pro-establishment) international business community and (to an extent) the government’s own Equal Opportunities Commission.

What is relatively new is the involvement of pro-establishment political parties in these debates. Members of the DAB – a Communist Party-front – have jumped on the anti-gay bandwagon. And now the pro-business/cartels Liberal Party has done the same, as they have with transgender recognition.

This doesn’t look like a coincidence. Cynics would also assume that anything these spineless puppets do is guided by the Chinese government’s local Liaison Office. So there are two possible explanations (which are not mutually exclusive).

One is that the Communist Party sees LGBT issues as part of the Western universal-rights threat, incompatible with its superior Leninist quasi-Confucian Chinese-characteristics human cultural zombification-civilization model. But if this were the case, we would expect gay etc communities in the Mainland to be given the full Muslim/lawyers/feminists clampdown treatment – which doesn’t seem to be happening.

The other is that the Liaison Office has identified this as a wedge-issue in Hong Kong. In other words, they believe they can use pro-family/local-values slogans to draw some popular support away from the pro-democrats to the patriotic camp. Such obsessive micro-management sounds right up their street, as does the probable futility of the effort.

 

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9 Responses to Doesn’t the Liaison Office have enough to do?

  1. Colonial Dinosaur says:

    My dear fellow you and the rest of HK are far behind the times… it is no longer LGBT, but LGBTQ…the Q being for Questioning one’s sexuality. This term, LGBTQ, is now an essential issue when Dr’s in the UK have to examine and take notes from children as young as 5 years old, for they must be asked as to their perceived gender status!
    Frankly, one wonders when this madness will end, and whether or not society has more important issues to address?

  2. Chinese Netizen says:

    Yet even MORE reason for the free People of Taiwan to distrust, despise and resist the CCP

  3. john says:

    Nah, it’s a smoke screen. Keep the national anthem and insidious oppression out of the headlines AND we can divide the masses so they won’t unite against any particular authoritarian regime. On a side note I do enjoy these lackeys’ furious insistence that nobody, NOBODY, should be meddling with HK’s internal affairs………….with one obvious exception.

  4. Headache says:

    @ Colonial Dinosaur

    You forgot “I” for intersex. Optionally also “A” for allies, nowadays.

    Pretty sure this will continue until we’ve covered the entire alphabet.

  5. Stanley Lieber says:

    @colonial dinosaur,

    It is you, dear fellow, who is behind the times.

    The proper acronym is LGBTQQIAAP.

    Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Questioning Intersexual Asexual Allies & Pansexual.

    Naturally.

  6. @Colonial Dinosaur – unimportant madness to you perhaps, but no laughing matter to young adolescents confused about their sexuality, who are being told on the one hand to go with what comes naturally, and on the other hand (Rule 1 – no poofters) that they will suffer eternal damnation if their desires don’t fit into the approved framework.

  7. LRE says:

    In the wise words of the great philosopher, Frank Zappa: “Hey this is the twenty-first century, whatever you want to do, let’s get on with it, as long as it doesn’t cause a murder.”

  8. Din Gao says:

    @Stanley Lieber. Are there no categories for the miniscule minority who have sex with giraffes or watermelons etc?
    I note that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (no pun intended) operated a device they called “the fruit machine” to identify gays in government: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/rcmp-uses-fruit-machine-to-detect-gays

  9. Stanley Lieber says:

    Acronym update:

    “The Canadian Elementary Teachers Federation (ETFO) of Ontario hosted a LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP inclusiveness training session on June 6.”

    “The acronym stands for Lesbian, Gay, Genderqueer, Bisexual, Demisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Twospirit, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, Asexual, Allies, Pansexual and Polyamorous.”

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