Pink Dot, Gay Rights, Social Attitudes & Mortality

Hello everyone. I have to thank my reader Dakota for the next question, which is a very good one. She asked me, "do you think that the LGBTQIA (lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer intersex asexual) community will one day be accepted by society? The recent "Wear white" and "Pink Dot" events feels very confrontational and hostile..."

Thank you so much for the question Dakota and I will attempt to cast some light on the issue based on my experience in the UK where we have so many gay pride events throughout summer. And yes, I do believe that some of that confrontation that Dakota has talked about is particularly nasty on social media - that is because people feel they can spout particularly hateful vitriol online but they would probably not have the guts to say such things in person. Back before everyone was on the internet, these religious bigots would actually have to turn up at a gay pride event to protest if they really felt so strongly about the issue - now they can do so from their laptops or smartphones. I will talk about this process of evolving social attitudes towards LGBT issues but also highlighting one of the most vital factors playing a part in this change: mortality. Death, that one thing that comes to all of us, eventually.

But first, please allow me to talk about the situation here in the UK which may cast some light on the evolution on LGBT acceptance. The UK was not a particularly progressive country on LGBT rights - it was only in 1967 when consensual gay sex between men was finally decriminalized in England & Wales (it was decriminalized only in 1981 in Scotland and 1982 in Northern Ireland), compare this to other European countries like Italy where it was decriminalized in 1890 and in France, it was way back in 1791. Even after 1967, things changed very slowly as gay people were still very much living in constant fear of being outed, in what was still a very homophobic and conservative society. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s did little to get rid of such homophobic attitude in society and Margaret Thatcher was openly homophobic as a prime minister and her government went out of their way to impede gay rights.

In the 1990s that things started to change for the better - Thatcher was gone by November 1990 and whilst her successor John Major wasn't exactly gay friendly, at least he wasn't as homophobic as she was. Frankly, it was hard to find a more homophobic prime minister than Thatcher - practically all British gay people who lived through the 1980s hate her as much as she hated the gays. But it was really under the Labour government with Tony Blair's victory in 1997 that we started to see huge leaps in gay rights in the UK - Blair may be a very controversial figure in light of the war in Iraq, but his record on gay rights and what he did for the gay community was outstanding. Blair's Labour government (in the period 1997 to 2010 - under Gordon Brown after Blair stepped down in 2007) introduced major pieces of gay rights legislation from equalizing the age of consent, civil partnerships (which led to gay marriages), adoption rights for LGBT couples, allowing openly gay people to serve in the military, transgender rights, migration rights for same-sex couples and most importantly, a whole range of laws to protect gay people from discrimination.

So that brings us up to our current day, in 2015 where we have enjoyed two terms with David Cameron as a reasonably gay-friendly prime minister who introduced gay marriage. I have lived in the UK since 1997. I had arrived in the UK just a few months after Tony Blair's historic election win. I had experienced first hand the momentous changes in British society since 1997, a period which was unprecedented in terms of British society becoming more and more gay friendly. In fact, the 2015 election produced the largest number of LGB MPs in any country, making us the country with the most gay government in the world. This is particularly remarkable because it means that a politician can be openly gay or lesbian and still win the popular vote - there can be no greater testament to demonstrate how accepting the British public is of the gay community, given that they have proven this at the ballot box during election time.

Thatcher was very homophobic.

This incredible period of gay rights achievements from 1997 to 2015 coincided with something else in British society: the UK is becoming less and less religious with church attendance falling year on year for a long time. In 2014, it was estimated that just 800,000 people attend a church service every Sunday (in a country of a population of 62 million - that's just 1.25%) , falling to less than half the levels in the 1960s and on top of that, the number of  Christians has fallen more than four million in a decade. One can see the correlation between the liberalizing of our gay rights laws and the falling church attendance: the less Christians there are, the less opposition we have to gay rights laws. As a gay man and an atheist, I view this is a very good thing because I want to live in a progressive, secular state and not one where Christians are trying to impose their religious views on me. I respect the rights of Christians to believe in whatever they want to believe, but at the same time, I want them to respect the fact that I do not believe in their god(s) and do not want them to inflict their religion on any part of my life.

At this point I should also  talk about the growth of Islam in the UK in the same period: Islam is the second biggest religion in the UK and unlike Christianity which is in sharp decline, the number of Muslims in the UK is growing. This is due to a mix of Muslims immigrants as well as converts to Islam. According to the last census in 2011, 4.4% of the population in the UK self-identified as Muslims and this was a huge jump from in 2001, when they numbered just 3.07% and back in 1991, when they numbered only 1.86%. Both the absolute number of Muslims as well as the percentage of Muslims have increased year on year and the number of mosques in the country have grown exponentially. Even at 4.4%, they are still a small minority and not all Muslims are homophobic - those who are more religious and conservative tend to be homophobic whilst those who are born in the UK and more assimilated tend to be more open-minded on the issue of gay rights. So let's not assume that all British Muslims are homophobic. And of course, there are British-Muslims who are LGBT as well, that is not a particular easy position to find oneself in.

There is no consensus on the issue even amongst Christians and Muslims.

The vast majority of British people are in fact irreligious, ie. even if their parents or grandparents once had a religion and they may have been involved in the religion when they were children, they have mostly abandoned it as adults. So a common example would be people who are nominally Christian - so they had parents who were Christians (or Catholic) and they were brought to attend church on Sundays as a child. The turning point seems to be when they leave home to either go to university or work in another part of the country, the moment they move away from their parents they stop going to church simply because their parents are not there nagging at them to go to church on Sunday. These people are now bringing up a whole new generation of British children who are not religious at all, hence the sharp decline in Christianity in the UK. The census is not always an accurate indication of the situation: so for example, someone could tick the box 'Christian' when it comes to their religion, despite not having stepped into a church in over 30 years. That is why I rely more on church-attendance statistics rather than the census sdata.

So in this context, how do the religious people feel about gay rights and the gay community? Well, it's not a straight forward situation. I would generally divide the attitudes of those in the religious  community into two camps: acceptance and resistance. Those in the acceptance camp basically recognize that the UK has become not just a gay-friendly country, but also an irreligious country and that as practicing Christians (or any other religion), they have effectively become a minority in the country. They then draw a line between what they practice within their religion and what the rest of the country does: so for example, a practicing Muslim would not consume pork or drinking alcohol because it is forbidden within Islam, but s/he accepts that non-Muslims would have no qualms about consuming pork. So on the issue of gay marriage, a practicing Christian may think that it would be unacceptable for someone within their church to have a gay marriage, but just like the issue of non-Muslims consuming pork or drinking alcohol, they accept that those who are not a member of their religion have other values and have a different stance on the issue.

Then there is other camp: that of resistance. Now they are the ones who vehemently oppose the gay community getting any more rights and in some cases, getting any rights. There are some in this camp who will accept that gay people should have the right to have civil partnerships, but gay marriage is a step too far - then there are those who believe that homosexuality should be a crime and that all gays should be jailed or killed. And there's a whole range of attitudes amongst this camp with some being more intolerant than others towards the LGBT community. Some would go as far as to protest and project their hatred towards the gay community, whilst others dislike gays but would exercise some restraint when it comes to making that public. So for example at the gay pride events in the UK, there would usually be Christian protesters who will be demonstrating their opposition towards the gay community - this is always carefully policed, to ensure that there are no conflicts or scuffles. Oh and I must point out, there is also a counter demonstration by Christians who are disgusted by the hatred displayed by their religion towards gays.

Now what has happened here in the UK in the last few decades is that those in the acceptance camp has grown and those in the resistance camp has declined. Some people may jump to the wrong conclusion that "that means that the situation can improve, we can win hearts and minds and change attitudes." Actually, no - there's something else going on that played a far more vital role. We call it mortality - dying. People eventually die, usually of natural causes when they get old. In the case of the decline of Christianity in the UK, the older people who go to church faithfully eventually Sunday died as they reached the end of their lives and the younger generation are simply not going to church: hence the net decline in church goers, do the maths. Likewise, the older generation who grew up in a country where homosexuality was a taboo and disapproved off as eventually die off one by one and the younger generation are growing up in a country where you have openly gay politicians, gay celebrities and far more gay friendly people.

Will the death of LKY bring social change to Singapore?

Let me give you a simple example: as mentioned earlier, Former PM Margaret Thatcher was quite openly anti-gay, she was homophobic.  What would she have made of the gay marriages taking place in the UK today? Nothing - because she is dead. In fact she died 3 months before the bill legalizing gay marriage was passed by the government, 11 months before the first gay marriage took place. So older, homophobic British people like Margaret Thatcher didn't change her mind, repent and became more gay-friendly, no - people like her simply died of old age and that meant the UK had one less homophobic person. As this process was repeated across the country, a side effect of the natural process of mortality is making the country less homophobic and more gay-friendly because of the generation gap: the younger generation have very different attitudes compared to their parents and grandparents. The natural process of mortality has actually done far more to change social attitudes in the UK than any kind of campaigning to change hearts and minds on such issues. Old fashioned attitudes like homophobia are literally dying off each time an older person dies - they do take their old fashioned ideas with them to the grave.

Let's compare this to the situation in Singapore then: there is a huge generation gap in Singapore, one that is probably far bigger than the one in the UK. My parents grew up speaking Hokkien and Hakka as their first languages, whilst I grew up speaking English as a first language (and my second language is French, not Mandarin). Thus, my views on most social issues are vastly different from those of my parents and my situation isn't that different from my peers who face the same huge generation gap. My dad is in his 80s and my mum is in her 70s - their attitudes are unlikely to change but their mortality is inevitable. I may inherit some money and property from my parents when they die but I certainly won't inherit their old fashioned attitudes: with each older person that passes on, the barometer of social attitudes in Singapore will shift away from the conservative end to the more liberal end of the spectrum. This is a process that has been happening quietly over the years - it's just that most of us are too uneasy to discuss the topic of mortality. Death is usually too morbid a subject for polite conversation. Everyone will die eventually, no one is immortal, so why should our mortality be such a taboo topic when it comes to discussing the evolution of social attitudes?

Attitudes towards gay marriage will change over years.

So perhaps it is necessary to pull back the focus from present and look at the long term process of how social attitudes evolve over the decades. I know the heated exchanges over this year's Pink Dot event may seem ugly but it is important to remember that such differences can never be resolved in the short term but to put it rather bluntly, you may have to wait a few decades for the most hateful bigots to eventually die off and hope that the next generation will be more enlightened, progressive and open minded. This has indeed been the case in the UK as well as many other countries in the West. So someone like pastor Lawrence Khong was born in 1952 and is currently 63 years old. The life expectancy in Singapore for men is about 80, so you can do the maths - he's likely to be around spouting his hatred for about another 17 years (maybe more, maybe less - life expectancy are by no means an accurate prediction of an individual's life span), so you now know how long more you have to put up with him.

But social change has already happened in Singapore in the last few decades: back when I was growing up, an event like Pink Dot would have been unthinkable because of the way Singapore was so much more homophobic back then. Even if you did try to organize such an event 30 years ago in 1985, no one would have turned up because of the social stigma of being publicly identified as gay or lesbian. Given the amount of public campaigning to change hearts and minds in Singapore on the issue of gay rights has been minimal and low-key at best, all this social change has mostly been brought about by the natural process of mortality, as in so many other places. And even is this trend of little or no activism continues in Singapore, things will continue to change for the better in Singapore because of the effect of mortality on the older generation. Of course, this process can be sped up with activism on the ground, but it is evident that so much has changed even without it in Singapore. And in the meantime, the disagreements and battles will rage on with no short term solution in sight, because the only solutions are long term as we wait for mortality to take hold.

Changing social attitudes is a process that will take decades

So that's it from me on this issue  I hope I have managed to do this topic justice and have given you food for thought, but what I am really hoping for is to stimulate more debate about the issue as I managed to the last time I did a post on LGBT issues. Please let me know your thoughts on the issue - do you think that mortality is the greatest contributor to social change or am I giving activists too little credit? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.