Gender and gay rights advocacy groups yesterday filed a slander lawsuit against the Taiwan Union for True Love, accusing the group of deliberately spreading falsehoods to undermine a new gender equality curriculum originally set to be introduced in schools in September.
“We are suing a Mr Chi [齊] from the so-called ‘Union for True Love’ because the group has repeatedly spread lies in an effort to undermine the gender equality curriculum,” said Lo Hui-wen (羅惠文), a member of the Taiwan Gender Equality Education Association (TGEEA). “We do not know Mr Chi’s real name, because he has never revealed it.”
Several groups filed a lawsuit with the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday morning.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
The TGEEA was joined by members from the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association, the Taiwan Adolescent Association on Sexualities, the Gender/Sexuality Rights Association Taiwan and the Tong-Kwang Light House Presbyterian Church in a demonstration outside the Ministry of Education before heading to the prosecutors’ office.
In a press release, the groups detailed the false information used by the Union for True Love as part of its efforts to label the proposed gender equality curriculum as promoting “sexual openness.”
For example, the Union for True Love has claimed the curriculum was teaching children sexual positions and it has said it encourages children to try different types of relationships — even polygamy.
“The curriculum mentions none of those things,” TGEEA secretary-general Lai Yu-mei (賴友梅) said.
The Union for True Love has also deliberately twisted some of actual content of the curriculum, Lai said.
For example, the union has said the curriculum promotes gay marriage, but in fact the part on gay marriage is introduced in a section on different types of families, including single-parent families, transnational families, gay families and adoptive families.
Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association board member Goffy said that, according to his investigative work, the Union for True Love actually consists of members of conservative Christian churches.
“They say they’re opposed to ideas on sex that are ‘too open.’ In fact, they are just anti-gay,” Goffy said. “They launched an online petition against the curriculum, but their demands have been revised several times and only the attacks on homosexuals remain.”
Controversy over the curriculum emerged earlier this month, when members of the Union for True Love took what they claimed were excerpts from a textbook to lawmakers, who then called for the curriculum to be suspended until the controversy had been cleared up.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS