On Saturday last week, New Power Party (NPP) Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) posted a Facebook message saying that the Stability Power Alliance, which has mounted a campaign to recall him from office, had sent people to shout slogans outside his home and harass his family.
Huang slammed the behavior, saying it was “really going too far,” adding that he would never submit to such malicious measures.
Alliance chairman Sun Chi-cheng (孫繼正) said Huang’s accusation was ridiculous, saying that the group does not even know where he lives.
However, Huang posted a reply contradicting Sun’s claim, a screenshot of a news report with the title: “Huang Kuo-chang recall campaigners collect signatures next to Huang’s home,” and he told the group to stop lying.
“In May this year, media owned by the Want Want China Times Group published this news report as free publicity for the Stability Power Alliance. It clearly demolishes the alliance’s version of events, does it not?” he wrote.
The alliance is a nationwide political organization launched by right-wing Christian churches. Its main founders were Christian supporters of the Faith and Hope League, who first set up its predecessors, the Greater Taipei Stability Power Alliance and Tainan Stability Power Alliance.
The group’s activities aim mainly to recall legislators who support marriage equality, and it is currently conducting recall initiatives against Huang and Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Wang Ding-yu (王定宇).
The NPP’s founding declaration should be considered: That everyone in Taiwan has the rights to basic human dignity, to pursue their dreams, defend their happiness and equal status, and to take part in politics and make their own decisions with a sense of identity and belonging as citizens.
The NPP says it wants a Taiwan that everyone admires and that everyone can be proud of.
The NPP calls for equality of the sexes and for everyone’s right to pursue happiness.
However, the Stability Power Alliance is only interested in the “right” to interfere in other people’s freedom of speech in the name of “stability.”
This kind of behavior is reminiscent of the approach favored by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) under martial law, which it imposed on Taiwan from 1949 to 1987.
KMT members and supporters lauded the benefits of martial law, such as that it ensured social “stability.”
It ignored that many people suffered political oppression under former presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). It glossed over atrocities such as the 228 Incident in 1947, the White Terror of the 1950s and the Kaohsiung Incident in 1989, not to mention the murders of pro-democracy lawyer Lin I-hsiung’s (林義雄) family in 1980, and the killing of democracy advocate Chen Wen-cheng (陳文成) in 1981.
What better word is there to describe the KMT than “hypocrites?”
By opposing the proposed marriage equality law, the Stability Power Alliance openly defines itself as an enemy of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
Does that mean that LGBT people should follow the group’s example by holding protests in front of its headquarters or its chairman’s home?
The Stability Power Alliance needs to think long and hard about the universal principle: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Deng Hong-yuan is an associate professor at Aletheia University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Would China attack Taiwan during the American lame duck period? For months, there have been worries that Beijing would seek to take advantage of an American president slowed by age and a potentially chaotic transition to make a move on Taiwan. In the wake of an American election that ended without drama, that far-fetched scenario will likely prove purely hypothetical. But there is a crisis brewing elsewhere in Asia — one with which US president-elect Donald Trump may have to deal during his first days in office. Tensions between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea have been at
A nation has several pillars of national defense, among them are military strength, energy and food security, and national unity. Military strength is very much on the forefront of the debate, while several recent editorials have dealt with energy security. National unity and a sense of shared purpose — especially while a powerful, hostile state is becoming increasingly menacing — are problematic, and would continue to be until the nation’s schizophrenia is properly managed. The controversy over the past few days over former navy lieutenant commander Lu Li-shih’s (呂禮詩) usage of the term “our China” during an interview about his attendance
Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), the son of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Politburo member and former Chongqing Municipal Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai (薄熙來), used his British passport to make a low-key entry into Taiwan on a flight originating in Canada. He is set to marry the granddaughter of former political heavyweight Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政), the founder of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital in Yilan County’s Luodong Township (羅東). Bo Xilai is a former high-ranking CCP official who was once a challenger to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for the chairmanship of the CCP. That makes Bo Guagua a bona fide “third-generation red”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hypersonic missile carried a simple message to the West over Ukraine: Back off, and if you do not, Russia reserves the right to hit US and British military facilities. Russia fired a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik,” or Hazel Tree, at Ukraine on Thursday in what Putin said was a direct response to strikes on Russia by Ukrainian forces with US and British missiles. In a special statement from the Kremlin just after 8pm in Moscow that day, the Russian president said the war was escalating toward a global conflict, although he avoided any nuclear
RSS