Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) vice presidential candidate Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), a Catholic, yesterday said that he respects the right of everyone — including homosexuals — to pursue happiness.
“The Lord loves everyone; so he loves homosexuals,” Chen said.
“Pope Francis said: ‘If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?’” Chen said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Therefore I also believe that gays have the right to pursue happiness and we should respect that right,” he said.
However, Chen said that since same-sex relations involves a change to society, the issue of marriage “needs deeper discussion before a decision is made.”
Chen spoke following his first attendance at a DPP weekly Central Standing Committee meeting.
Chen said an accusation by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that he was involved in plagiarism was negative campaigning, but added that he did not expect it to start so soon.
A day after DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) announced Chen as her running mate on Monday, KMT legislators Alicia Wang (王育敏), Alex Tsai (蔡正元) and former KMT legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) made the accusation of plagiarizm in a press conference at the KMT caucus office, saying that Chen Chien-jen and National Taiwan University (NTU) Hospital physician Chen Kuan-yu (陳冠宇) and NTU president Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池), co-authored a paper in 2007 and submitted it to the international medical periodical Cancer, but was returned because there was plagiarism involved.
Chen denied the accusation, saying that it was only a problem involving quotation, not plagiarism, adding that after a revision, the paper was resubmitted and was published.
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