Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative candidate Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) at a campaign rally on Friday night asked voters not to let his New Power Party counterpart Freddy Lim (林昶佐), who has “hair that is longer than a woman’s and is mentally abnormal,” into the legislature. Lin yesterday said Lim’s long hair was not why he called him mentally abnormal.
Lin said the statement about Lim’s long hair was “a description of Lim’s current state without judgement.”
“I find both short and long hair nice-looking. Lim should show his long hair openly; there is no need to hide it,” he added.
“The mentally abnormal part was referring to Lim’s criticism of a prosecutor who pressed charges against and called for a heavy sentence be imposed on Justin Lee (李宗瑞), who sexually assaulted 34 women, calling the prosecutor ‘childish and perverted,’” Lin said.
Lee was convicted of sexual assaults and offenses related to privacy for filming sexual acts with women without their consent. Lim in 2012, when Lee was first charged, criticized a prosecutor who called Lee “a pervert, childish and in need of treatment” for the prosecutor’s conflation of personal feelings and duties.
“The prosecutors’ job is to investigate in accordance with the law and evidence, not for you to vent your personal feelings,” Lim wrote on Facebook at the time, adding that such prosecutors “are themselves the childish perverts who need to go back to school in a society of rule of law.”
Lin on Friday said that people should not let Lim, who took part in the occupation of the Legislative Yuan during the Sunflower movement, but has now “suited up, try to swagger into the Legislative Yuan.”
Lim yesterday said he has always been “unwilling to respond” to the KMT’s accusations, adding that Lin’s remarks on Friday “were completely discriminatory.” Lin was, “with his own perspective, discriminating against someone who is different from him,” Lim said.
Chinese dissident Wang Dan (王丹) yesterday lamented the “degeneration of a 100-year-old party,” referring to the KMT.
The KMT “was a grand party that once shone in history,” Wang said. “Even when it is losing, it should face it with dignity in order to win people’s respect.”
“However, anti-civilization, anti-intellectual and anti-human comments not only have nothing good to offer the party’s image, but only show that it has given up on the future, so it could say whatever it wants,” he said.
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