Making scapegoats of LGBTs

JUNE 10 — I’m finding it hilarious that some columnists here in The Malaysian Insider seem to be blaming the LGBT community here for almost everything. Just the other week I got into a cab and, the moment I tell the taxi driver I’m gay, he shoots off a volley of questions that just make everything seem rather awkward.

Is it true gays are the cause of Muslim men going clubbing?

Do the gays really ruin marriages?

And, to even further the awkwardness, suddenly you have people writing about how gays are the cause of lower birth rates.

Thank Allah he didn’t blame us for the economic downturn and perhaps even bursting the property bubble as well!

Let me first answer the first of two questions. No, we are not the cause of Muslim men going clubbing, getting drunk, enjoying the company of GROs while their wives sit at home tending her children at the dinner table.

We don’t need GROs. There are plenty of rainbow fish in the sea without needing to go for the peacocks. Muslim men were drinking long before they came out of the closets. Heck, I would even say they were drinking because they were in their comfy closets for a long time.

And secondly, gays do not ruin marriages. Society did that all by itself by making their gay members marry out of communal and peer pressure. Let’s face it; if your firstborn son was gay, would you rather him spawn the next generation than have his own way and live the life he wants?

That’s not rhetorical, that’s just fact. Every single damn time a relative asks, “Bila nak makan nasi minyak?” or “Bila nak buat kenduri?”, it isn’t a call for gays to host a party or show off their cooking prowess, it’s a call for you to get a wife.

And that’s just sick.

Now, about this lowering of birth rates, how does he even know this? For all we know registered birth rates could be going down while cases of illegitimate babies being born and thrown into latrines, trash cans, garbage dumps and so on might be on the rise? Do we even have an official abortion rate?

And why is being gay the excuse for lower birth rates? Why is it not the fact that women are now more competitive in the working world?

It is commonplace knowledge that the lower birth rate is due to the later age of marriages among both men and women in Malaysia. The cause for this is simple. The economy is so bad that they can’t even save enough to get married.

Instead, the Malaysians of marrying age, particularly in the urban areas, are busy trying to earn enough merely to survive, let alone to put aside enough for that “kenduri nasi minyak”, to buy a house, to finance a car and even to head out of their way to go for a honeymoon.

And furthermore, do not even bother to go into the religious views, saying that gays are not religious enough. I dare you to go into any sekolah agama and madrasah and ask the boys there if any of the ustaz ever got frisky with them.

Heck, it wasn’t long ago we read in Sinar Harian about how an ustaz kissed a boy (and he liked it) before he went skedaddling to Yemen to avoid the authorities. Ask those former students how many of them were molested. Go ahead.

I believe that the Malaysian LGBT community is currently being made the scapegoat of all and sundry simply because they don’t want to face their own problems any longer. They don’t want to blame the government for rising costs of living. They don’t want to even acknowledge that gay people are no different than straights and instead calling it “seks songsang.”

The Malaysian LGBT community, of which I can personally testify, is made up of brilliant individuals who only want to be given the right to privacy and live their lives in peace. We don’t molest six-month-old babies because our wives are unavailable. We don’t go about becoming bomohs and marrying girls a third our age, getting them pregnant and then blaming a genie. We don’t go about having sex with our own sisters and daughters and, quite frankly, we don’t even offer money to parents so that they would marry off their pre-pubescent daughters to us in accordance to Sharia law.

We’d rather use that money to buy a gorgeous Birkin or Louis Vuitton.

So please, make us scapegoats if you must, Malaysia. We’ll take it and still be fabulous.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.