Malaysia’s most read online newspaper has published a Christmas call for tolerance towards LGBTs just days after a prominent lawmaker warned Malays about adopting foreign views on homosexuality
Malaysia’s most read news website has published a Christmas call for tolerance for LGBTs from a reader.
The Malaysia Kini website published the article ‘Bethlehem revisited – the sacred in the unfamiliar’ by Queer Asian Spirit magazine editor Joseph N. Goh on December 22 in which he called on Malaysians to take Christmas as an opportunity to reflect on God’s mysterious ways.
‘Perhaps Christmas is a timely occasion to reflect on the unexpected and unusual workings of God in human lives – and perhaps even to consider the presence of the holy in the lives of LGBT persons,’ Goh wrote.
‘Christian theologians have always abided by the notion that all of creation is unequivocally good.
‘Sin and error may not simplistically lie in Malaysian LGBT persons who attempt to be true to themselves, but in the frenetic efforts of those who condemn them without a thought that God can perhaps be encountered in previously unimagined places, including the lives of LGBT Malaysians.’
The call for tolerance came just days after Malaysian authorities condemned the establishment of an LGBT friendly mosque in France and warned about European trends about homosexuality spreading to Malaysia.
‘They are using human rights as an excuse for them to do whatever their heart pleases but we must know what is right and wrong,’ Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Mashitah Ibrahim told the New Straits Times.
Earlier this year Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammad Najib Abdul Razak decribed LGBT people as ‘deviant,’ while another Malaysian lawmaker has called for rehab centres for homosexuals like those used for drug addicts.
by Andrew Potts
Source – Gay Star News
