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23 Jun 2011

Hong Kong government learns how to lose face by shooting itself in the foot

Fridae's Hong Kong correspondent Nigel Collett examines the furore surrounding the Hong Kong Government's appointment of a reparative therapist advocate to train its social welfare staff.

It is not often that the Hong Kong Government allows its prejudices to so get the better of it’s judgment that it does something stupid enough in the field of human rights for even Singapore to point the finger at. On 17 June it became clear that it just had. On that day that vanguard of campaigning liberalism, Singapore’s Straits Times, carried the headline: Hong Kong government hires 'gay conversion expert'. How smug its staff must have been to be able to report that the Hong Kong government had hired as a trainer for its social welfare staff a prominent local psychiatrist who claimed he could 're-wire' homosexuals! With glee, they characterised this as the world's first government-sponsored training session on gay conversion therapy.

The news had only just broken in Hong Kong’s own local press. The English language daily The South China Morning Post reported that psychiatrist Hong Kwai-wah had conducted three and a half hours’ training for sixty government social welfare staff on Friday 10 June. Hong, a favourite mouthpiece for fundamentalist homophobes in Hong Kong, denied that his training mentioned ‘conversion therapy’ but had to admit to reporters that he had cited case studies to argue that gays could be treated and turned into heterosexuals.

Local LGBT groups, including Women Coalition of the Hong Kong SAR, Ten Percent Club and Rainbow of Hong Kong picketed the Lady Trench Training Centre in Wan Chai (where the two-and-a-half-hour training had taken place) on 16 June. The reports of this are assembled on the Tongzhi Community Joint Meeting (TCJM)’s website.

The government almost immediately found itself on the back foot, not helped by the ineptness of the junior civil servant the Social Welfare Department thrust in front of reporters to respond: "Multiple perspectives are essential for social workers to make professional and independent assessments of their cases," the un-named unfortunate said, rather as if it were government practice that every time it dealt with a case of social abuse it should consult a witch finder to advise on the possibility that the victim was under a spell. 

If all this was not enough to make Hong Kong’s senior bureaucrats squirm, the news rapidly spread worldwide. Pink News picked it up the same day in the United Kingdom, where it told its presumably bemused readers that psychiatrist Hong Kwai-wah, trainer for the government’s social welfare staff, was chairman of the New Creation Association, a body which says the wishes of gay people who want to become straight should be respected and has a website that says its aims are ‘to help people struggling with homosexuality and diffuse their inner dilemmas, rewire their mental state as well as propagate the belief that "homosexuals can change". Treatments advocated by this organisation reportedly include cold showers, prayer and abstinence. Pink News reported that it was not known how much Hong was being paid by the tax payer for spreading his message of light.

The 56-year-old doctor, who is described on christianmentalhealth.com as a specialist in "treating unwanted homosexuality", has defended his therapy saying: "I did mention about the possibility to change which is an option. We need to respect the client’s choice, whether they want to remain status quo or they want to live a heterosexual life...We should not ban people from therapy if they want to change. We should respect their right."

The peanuts Hong would have earned talking to a few social workers would, though, no doubt pale into insignificance compared with the sums the Hong Kong Social Welfare Department must be forking out in grants to his NGO’s brother organisation, the Society of Truth and Light (STL), which is the fundamentalist christian NGO that has led the fight against every improvement in LGBT human rights in Hong Kong. He is also a board member of the group. Research has discovered that this homophobic bunch has set up a hotline to ‘counsel’ homosexuals and staffed it with sponsorship from the Social Welfare Department. For those amongst you who can read Chinese, check out their link at: http://www.truth-light.org.hk/homo_hotline

The Hong Kong government is not an overtly oppressive body. Much of what it does rests on liberal principles and honesty. Many of its members honourably seek to serve the whole public. Yet every now and then, like now, the lid is lifted on the prejudices lurking inside its departments, and out pops some form of ill-informed christianity masquerading as confucianism or as a need to conform to ‘social consensus’.

More worrying still is the way that fundamentalist Christian believers within civil service ranks seek to use their positions to further their ‘ethical’ aims. Teachers and educators circulate homophobic booklets in schools or use the parents of their pupils to petition government against LGBT rights. They hang anti-LGBT banners on their external school walls. They issue grants to the fundamentalist NGOs whose beliefs they favour. They stonewall change.

The Hong Kong government has a good deal of form here. Back in 2005, its Education Bureau quietly appointed the STL to teach human rights to secondary school teachers. On that occasion, activist Roddy Shaw led a finally successful campaign that so embarrassed the government that it did not renew the teaching contract at the end of the year. What became evident, horrifyingly, during the campaign, was that the responses made to the media by civil servants and representatives of the STL were almost word for word the same, a coincidence unlikely to have occurred without collusion. The Education Bureau, its fingers badly burned by open association with fundamentalist NGOs, has avoided any overt links ever since. 

Not so the civil servants of the Social Welfare Department, who have embarked upon the same quest for international loss of face as their colleagues in the Education Bureau had done six years ago. And it will be loss of face. For there is no doubt that the more sane members of the Hong Kong government will be forced to pull back from the foolishness inflicted by their subordinates. One thing the Hong Kong government cannot stand is loss of face, and it is face that it is in the process of losing in a big way. The news of this foolishness has now gone viral. In Hong Kong, activists have started a petition which is has already garnered almost 1,000 signatures to date.

The US campaign Truth Wins Out, with its poster boy Lieutenant Dan Choi, who was recently in Moscow being arrested at their Pride Parade, has lent a hand with another petition

Buoyed by this international support, Hong Kong activists are mobilising to take the campaign further. Exactly what is planned is becoming clearer, and is likely to involve pressure upon medical, psychiatric, psychological, social welfare and educational professional bodies to at last make firm statements distancing themselves from the snake oil peddled by the reparativists. They have so far been either too cowardly or too conservative to take a stand, but they are unlikely to be able to avoid doing so for much longer. Much the same applies to government departments, whose cries of allowing a ‘balance’ of views and permitting ‘freedom of speech’ have so far managed to privilege the teaching of faith-based untruth over scientific fact. The government of ‘Asia’s World City’ as it likes to call itself will be brought to face the fact that its functionaries are propagating mumbo jumbo worthy of darkest Africa.

One clear objective will be to prevent any more tax payers’ dollars being spent on such nonsense. The irony is that businesses with the most liberal and all-encompassing diversity policies are paying corporation tax to fund fundamentalists campaigning against the rights of their own LGBT employees. Here at least is a clear and present target that everyone in Hong Kong will understand.

So, this incident has been a nonsense and a horrifying one, but one that will have effects unintended by its perpetrators, effects that this correspondent for one is confident will ultimately benefit the rights of the LGBT community in Hong Kong. Time, it would seem, for the community to gird its loins to take advantage of the opportunity with which the idiots in government have presented it.

讀者回應

1. 2011-06-23 22:38  
whoever going to see tht doctor, pls convert him!
回應#2於於2011-06-23 23:40被作者刪除。
回應#3於於2011-06-23 23:39被作者刪除。
4. 2011-06-23 23:38  
How much did he earn per "successful conversion"???
How many lives did he ruin in the process???
Hong Kwai-wah??? Do you know the meaning of these words- "what goes around...comes around???" Perhaps not...you sit like a king, all pomp & splendor, cocksure in your safety, nestled within the comforts & protection of the HK govt. Enjoy...for all is transient...just like yr facade. :)
5. 2011-06-24 02:42  
How do we treat 'unwanted christianity'?

"Cold showers, prayer and abstinence" perhaps. Ok maybe not the prayer bit.

Sad tarts. They need to fix the ignorance and hatred in their own hearts and homes before they attempt to fix society's supposed 'ills.' Society is not 100% christian. Not everyone believe in your psychotic imaginary sky friend.

What goes around comes around - maybe China will one day outlaw christianity again? Then these 'morally righteous' will suddenly find themselves being re-educated. Surely they will cry victim then.
6. 2011-06-24 02:49  
I love the way believers can take a few lines from the bible and make that into their godly divinely-ordained mission. Like this from the New Creation Association:

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature:old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians Ch5 v17-18)

By the same token I can see a sex-slave service set up in the name of, and in accordance with the terms and conditions stipulated in the bible:

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)

More lovely passages from http://www.evilbible.com
7. 2011-06-24 02:56  
F!ing messed up. It seems the wider and more open the world becomes, the narrower the mindset of government. Doesn't matter where you are in the world, government entities are self serving and self politicking ... there's quite a bit of disregard for boundaries, mission and purpose .... oh I forgot people too ... err constituents, as it were. I think they invent as they go along. lol
8. 2011-06-24 08:26  
You're not being fair shitz@6, Corinthians is a bunch of letters from Paul, but Exodus could only have been written by God, so...oh hang on...
9. 2011-06-24 08:29  
hahahha I think it's a bit funny. A good psychiatrist should know that a behavioural trait can be changed, but the deep imprints into our brain and gene set up can not be changed. Maybe he come see me, I'll help him convert! God Bless him for trying. Stick something sweet in his mouth, he'll be sucking on it for hours!
10. 2011-06-24 08:46  
More about the damage this stuff does...hear a new radio interview by the sister of the Sissy Boy Project victim, she's becoming a strong advocate against this sort of thing...

http://www.kfan.com/cc-common/podcast/single_page.html?podcast=KFAN_Barreiro&selected_podcast=Barreiro%25206-22%2520HR%25202.mp3
11. 2011-06-24 10:36  
There is a distinction between choices, which is open to all and choices, which is not open, (* made by the government).

Choices shall be available to all gays. But choices cannot be made by government. It's one of the fundamental rights of one gay to choose his life.

It's solely a contractual obligation, whether he or she, as a gay chooses to change or not to change his or her sexuality. And if yes, all consequential effects must be understood and borne.

The next question is whether the therapy is more beneficial to the "changed" person or not, can only be determined by those statistical data and case studies. That's where the concern comes in, not every scientific study is conducted absolutely independent of any other factors. One should actually read up all the results of experiment and make a value judgment to those effects before opts to change. And it must be understood that those risks existed which might cause psychological side effects post therapy, albeit in 0.01%, must be understood and accepted.

Let's choose. The choices are always ours.
12. 2011-06-24 11:15  
Mr Hong's infiltration, by his organisation, into Hong Kong governance and his ability to undermine and block any LGBT efforts to achieve equality needs to be considered. Renker's style pseudo-science aside, christianist influence in Hong Kong would have made our infamous Thio household proud. They are so good at ruining lives aren't they? I support the author's optimism and positive channelling that we will prevail in exposing their hypocrisy and manipulation.
13. 2011-06-24 14:02  
The unknowing adherents cannot or will not hear their god as he/she/it wails "You FOOLS! I SPENT 6 *MONTHS* WORKING ON THAT (poly expressionism/homosexuality)! "
14. 2011-06-24 18:47  
dumb psychiatrist...
15. 2011-06-24 21:12  
I can't help but point out the irony that he is officially registered as a specialist in endocrinology, not psychiatry:

http://www.hongkongdoctorlist.com/dr-hong-kwai-wah/prod_166.html

Even by APA and BPS standard, homosexuality is not longer considered a mental illness for decades already. Since that's the case, conversion towards being gay or straight not out of freewill is unethical and unnatural. I don't get why doctors who violates ethics like that ain't strip of their license. Doctors in their capacity of their profession, are not authorised to make and enforce moral and cultural judgement.

I guess the news comes at a good time, considering the UN human rights council has specifically passed a resolution specifically with regards to deterring abuses to the LGBT community. News like this from HongKong is going to attract international attention. Not sure if China might intervene and do that "mind your own business" thingy though, given that China seems to be pounding hard on LGBT groups within mainland China too.
16. 2011-06-24 22:29  
I find these kind of stories interesting. Many people around the world have the Hopelessly wrong, cliched view that my country - Ireland - is some kind of super-conservative, religious place. Which it Was - 50 years ago.

Today, there's no way that Any kind of religiously-led figure would be let anywhere near any kind of social or political policies, such as HK's Govt seem to be doing. There would be an outcry if it was found that any kind of 'gay conversion' figure, or group, was working anywhere within our government, and indeed, it would breach both our own soverign policies about creating, fostering and respecting equality and diversity within Ireland, as well as EU rules on such matters.

Why is this kind of nonsense allowed in other countries? Governments are supposed to very much respect religion and faith - but in a multi-faith context; Policy is supposed to be purely secular and humanist-led, and not influenced in any way by Religion.

So, it will be interesting to see what further develops in this story, and what kind of excuse HK's policy makers can have for justifying such an official.

Unless, of course, they plan on hiring a 'Heterosexuality converter', to 'counsel' Straight people who're fed up of their life, and want to be Gay instead. That, at least, would be balanced stupidity...
17. 2011-06-24 23:01  
Check out what he's doing and refer him to his professional body for disciplinary action if appropriate. People are being disciplined for this sort of thing these days.
回應#18於於2011-06-26 02:59被作者刪除。
19. 2011-06-24 23:44  
#5 shitzutonka: Actually,Hk's problem has more to do with the Pinkerton syndrome than the Christian religion.
20. 2011-06-25 02:20  
In most Asian, majority still believe homosexual as unhealthy, shameful. When people has this kind of mindset, it is easily being used.

Same thing as superstitious.

I suppose some gay also want to think themselves they can be straighten, just like hair straightener...lol



21. 2011-06-25 11:23  
Aren't many Fundamentalist Christian organisations and in particular their leaders now discredited in the USA as fraudsters and just out to make money from suckers that join? Why on earth is the HK Gov silly enough to fund any part of them !
22. 2011-06-25 15:19  
alright all you Potter fans out there, wave your wand together now:
"Riddikulus"
23. 2011-06-25 19:34  
Lol sexytenga, they probably want to ban Potter too, like their American counterparts, for "promoting witchcraft". I wonder if their stupidity is learned behaviour.
24. 2011-06-26 00:16  
Tinboy30 & Kumabro_oz, you hit the jackpot - it's certainly learned behavior. Take a look at HK back then - indeed it wasn't perfect, what with the homophobic bullying in Christian schools (another symptom of the Pinkerton complex) but you'll never hear of police harassment of gay events a la the recent IDAHO held there. And their GLBT-themed movies- wow!!! A far cry from the garbage you see today. Looking at the situation one seems to get the impression the trends all point toward INSTITUTIONAL homophobia in HK...and that's a worrying sign.
25. 2011-06-26 08:17  
And btw, why do I keep seeing depressing news like the above, and not something like this:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/york-state-senate-approves-gay-marriage-021710511.html
26. 2011-06-26 15:43  
shitzutonka@6: Doesn't this just about sum it all up beautifully "Not everyone believes in your psychotic imaginary sky friend". Children go though a phase where they have imaginary best friends but then they grow up and have real friends. Why can't adults do the same?
27. 2011-06-26 19:48  
My theory is that religious zealots were abused during their childhood, or had an absent father figure, leading to the need to have an invisible all powerful father figure. I think we should do a survey and then offer them deprogramming therapy funded by the government.
28. 2011-06-26 23:23  
Maybe as a form of reparation the Social Welfare department can start offering heterosexual conversions for those enlightened, but unfortunate, straight people who long to be gay.
29. 2011-06-29 23:50  
People can dye their hair but it's still the same colour underneath. No amount of therapy can change a brunette into a blonde. Shaving your head is no answer either, you can shave every day it will still grow back. Better to be a happy brunette than a sad baldy.
30. 2011-07-05 12:07  
this is just embarrassing...
and stop making it sounds like there is a choice between str8 or gay...
as Gaga would say...we are just "born this way""
修改於2011-07-05 12:09:39

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