More blatant hypocrisy from George Yeo Yong Boon and his merry men....
"So it was good to hear the voice of Singapore's moral majority ringing loud and clear in Parliament last week against the growing sexual permissiveness here, with PAP backbenchers playing Mrs Mary Whitehouse, Britain's one-woman champion of high moral standards.
Perhaps their views will put some spine into people like me who feel uneasy about the routes some friends are taking to personal fulfilment and happiness and yet refrain from voicing our feelings for fear of being condemned fuddy-duddy.
Like BG (Res) George Yeo, the Minister for Information and the Arts, the MPs conceded that Singapore is not "a Victorian society" but one that is "utterly ventilated".
Nevertheless, like him, they believe Singapore must maintain its moral standards and defend the respectable, so that it can be "a society which keeps up with changes in the world without compromising on the wholesome quality of civic life".
Said Mr Peh Chin Hua (Jalan Besar GRC): "We have to strike a balance between the conservative attitude of the East and the liberal thinking of the West towards sex."
Mr Ho Peng Kee (Sembawang GRC) worried that Singapore's "traditional values are in danger of being challenged (which) if left unchecked, Singaporeans may become...less conservative in sexual behaviour in the Next Lap".
As for Mrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon (Yuhua), she asked rhetorically: "Do we want to develop into a situation where because of sympathy, self-centredness and convenience we abandon our Eastern and oriental tradition about marriage?"..." "Wanted : more voices with good conscience" 147th Prostitute Press 22 March 1992
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Wanted : more voices with good conscience
Tan Sai Siong
147th Prostitute Press 22 March 1992
WHAT do you say if a close friend who is married tells you that he or she has fallen out of love with his or her spouse and is in love with another?
What do you do if a close woman friend tells you she intends to be an unmarried mother?
It has been drummed into me since my university days in Britain in the 1960s
that one must not be judgmental about anything as personal as love, or sex, that I would not be anything but sympathetic and encouraging.
I have enough friends whose marriages have soured because of a third party t o have grown blase about such triangles whenever another friend's marriage bites the dust.
What I am trying to drive at is that by the 1970s and 1980s, extramarital affairs, divorces and re-marriages had already become more widespread in Singapore and were no longer the unspeakable scandals that they were once in my parents' days.
However, I have yet to have one close woman friend choose gamely to be a single mother, perhaps because having a child out of wedlock is still not a preferred option, flower children though most of us had been in the 1960s.
But do not believe for a moment that the push for wider frontiers beyond what is acceptable conventionally and morally is not there.
And I do not mean only what was reflected in the recent Straits Times articl e highlighting a few Singapore women who became unmarried mothers voluntarily.
I have a male friend who confided in me his longing to father and bring up a
child without the hassle of courtship and marrying a woman. At 40, he said he did not want to waste time achieving fatherhood.
When he told the same story to another woman friend, she turned to him and replied wistfully: "Oh, ..., if I did not know you so well, I would have thought you were proposing."
Well, our mutual friend was proposing, in his fashion, but of a brave new world which, because I lack clear-cut certainty and conviction about the sanctity of marriage, home and family, I cannot pronounce as utterly, reprehensibly wrong.
Sure, I am conventional enough to find the idea of deliberate single parenthood a bit, um, unconventional.
But I prefer to chastise such parents for being financially imprudent becaus e bringing up a child is an expensive enough affair even when you are a couple on double-income, so when that support is halved, the burden must double.
I cannot bring myself to say that they are wrong. To do so would be to deny some of the widely-accepted fundamentals of my generation which make today's society so much more tolerant of private idiosyncrasies and the individual's right to happiness.
Thank goodness the days of King Edward and Mrs Wallis Simpson are long gone but in the accelerating liberalism of the 1990s - which make the swinging 60s look staid by contrast - I ask whether the pendulum could possibly have gone a bit far.
So it was good to hear the voice of Singapore's moral majority ringing loud and clear in Parliament last week against the growing sexual permissiveness here, with PAP backbenchers playing Mrs Mary Whitehouse, Britain's one-woman champion of high moral standards.
Perhaps their views will put some spine into people like me who feel uneasy about the routes some friends are taking to personal fulfilment and happiness and yet refrain from voicing our feelings for fear of being condemned fuddy-duddy.
Like BG (Res)George Yeo, the Minister for Information and the Arts, the MPs conceded that Singapore is not "a Victorian society" but one that is "utterly ventilated".
Nevertheless, like him, they believe Singapore must maintain its moral standards and defend the respectable, so that it can be "a society which keeps up with changes in the world without compromising on the wholesome quality of civic life".
Said Mr Peh Chin Hua (Jalan Besar GRC): "We have to strike a balance between the conservative attitude of the East and the liberal thinking of the West towards sex."
Mr Ho Peng Kee (Sembawang GRC) worried that Singapore's "traditional values are in danger of being challenged (which) if left unchecked, Singaporeans may become...less conservative in sexual behaviour in the Next Lap".
As for Mrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon (Yuhua), she asked rhetorically: "Do we want to develop into a situation where because of sympathy, self-centredness and convenience we abandon our Eastern and oriental tradition about marriage?"
The operative word - and herein lies the dilemma in a society like Singapore , striving to become more compassionate and more forgiving of failures - is "sympathy".
I ask: Have Singaporeans in their rush to be sympathetic - note the trend towards no-fault non-acrimonious divorces - abdicated their duty to judge right from wrong?
Has a more civilised community with a growing ability to see the other's point of view blinded some of us to values and vices so that they become neither good nor bad, except when thinking makes them so?
More voices with good conscience, whether from Parliament or leaders and teachers outside with good moral authority, are needed to re-define the boundaries of good moral values but which will not repress - unlike the days of old - an individual's right to personal happiness. Let me hear them.