On NLB, censorship and what educating your kids should mean

Okay so one of the hottest topics on local social media right now is regarding the removal of 2 books, And Tango Makes Three, and The White Swan Expess from the National Library Board.

And Tango Makes Three is about two male penguins that adopted a penguin chick on the brink of death and brought it up in a happy family, while The White Swan Express features a family of all backgrounds and sexual orientations (and includes a lesbian couple and single mother as two of its members). A member of the public wrote to NLB stating concerns that the presence of these books promotes unconventional family structures and threatened the conventional nucleus family (1 man, 1 woman, and kids that are biologically theirs). It also, apparently, goes against the values of Singapore because homosexuality. NLB removes the books from their shelves, then all hell broke loose.

Read the backlash in the form of online comments here and here. I took part in this hell party too. YAY, my first party since I started college! :)

Online petitions have also sprung up from the pro-LGBT rights community (I say pro-LGBT rights because not all of us are LGBT), urging NLB to reconsider its decision to remove such books. If you are passionate about this issue I would encourage you to sign (or just read) the petitions here and here.

Now, most people who know me know that I am pro-LGBT rights, but I will not delve into this issue today. I will not be touching on whether gays should be allowed to marry in Singapore or if the anti-Pink Dot movement ought to be silenced. I will also not comment about the role of religion in the LGBT movement. All I will say is, the Christianity I know is one that teaches love and acceptance regardless of your background. How Christians choose to interpret the various texts in the Bible is entirely their business; I will leave the Christian community to cover this themselves. 

I will instead be touching, specifically, on NLB's act of censorship and what this means for us as a society.

Now, should institutions (such as NLB, AWARE etc) be policing the morals of our society?

The recent censorship of words/books/information on NLB's part, in the name of morals, reminds me of 2 similar incidents in our past- AWARE's censorship of rape lyrics in the SAF, and the government's ban on Ashley Madison in Singapore. I was an avid supporter of censorship in both of these cases. So why are these forms of censorship okay, but not the kind of censorship carried out by NLB?

Singing of raping a cheating girlfriend constitutes hate speech and is chargeable in the eyes of the law. It hurts a historically marginalised group (i.e. women). In the second case, with the introduction of Ashley Madison, cheating is made easier. You may argue that a spouse who cheats probably already belongs in a sour marriage anyway, but opening up a channel to cheat allows people to resolve their marriages by taking the easy way out rather than through healthy alternatives (marriage counselling, or even divorce on both parties' terms). Cheating has a REAL impact on families and they hurt the party cheated on as well as the children.

What about these, erm, I shall lazily refer to them as "gay books"? Can the two "gay books" harm our society the same way rape songs hurt women in the military, or the same way cheating hurts families?

What gay books do: tell an unconventional story about love

Photo credit: Memecentre

NLB's favourite gay books, to set the record straight, did not contain sexually explicit material. It was simply a story about a happy family minus a female mum. The books were informative, they merely send information that happy gay families can exist, and they do in many parts of the world. Granted the marriage of this homosexual couple was not condemned, but the book did not outright send the message to little boys and girls that gay is better than not gay.

The book is apparently available on youtube. Hey parents, what's that I hear? Your kids are spending more time on the Internet these days and probably won't ever step into a National Library unless someone forces them to somehow. But anyway, if you need proof that And Tango Takes Three is purely narrative/informative, here's the link.

The most common argument supporting the removal of the books is this: as a national library, easily accessed by young, impressionable children, material that goes against the conventions of society should not be available to these kids should they read it and be brainwashed. So, only material that conforms to what the majority of the population deems as normal, or moral, should be made available to kids. Therefore, the gay books should be destroyed and pulped. Yeah, this is exactly what is happening now so if you're one of the "pro-family" citizens, I guess, erm, good for you?

Except this sounds exactly like what you do not want happening to your children- to be brainwashed. And the pulping of books probably takes it to 1st century BC extremes!

Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China, and pioneer of book burning and the killing of scholars, will be proud

Restricting a child's worldview such that it conforms to yours is a scary thing to do. The problem is compounded when the whole nation, even in supposed "goldmines" of information such as the national library, support this restriction on a child. The child is restricted access to a wide range of information, he or she is blinded to realities of life (that is, that LGBT people do exist) because their parents' generation had worked so hard to keep these things out of their reach- that they grow up not being able to make their own moral stands, they grow up to not think critically.

We've been spoonfed by the education system in Singapore since we were kids, even in primary school, we were thought civic morals. We even had a textbook named "好公民" (there were Malay and Tamil versions) teaching us how we should act in public. These were good initiatives by the government to introduce us to the concepts of good and bad. But guess what folks- that isn't how we found out it is wrong to bully people into suicide, or that is wrong to be racist or sexist. We experience, learn and explore through personal experiences, and through reading about these things in the news. We made our own judgement calls and when we say in anger "That is so racist!" it is truly because we feel indignance, and believed all races are equal. Not because "好公民" said so.

If you go overseas and tell your international friends that you respect your Malay neighbours because your Primary 3 "好公民" textbook told you to, they will laugh can? Also, it will make them wonder if you still go to the supermarket holding your mother's hand.
Photo credit to NTU

In the same vein, why would it be alright for morals to be fed directly into a child through the restriction of information on a national level? There is a difference between educating and spoonfeeding. What "好公民" does is to spoonfeed- its role is only to introduce young kids to courtesy and the concept of right and wrong. The education system, the government, the media or NLB are under no obligation to raise your kids for you. You want to educate your child properly, you got to teach him or her how to think for themselves. It is not going to happen if all they are being shown on TV and the media, or in books, are representations of the same conventions that people are comfortable with. It is not going to happen if they are not exposed to morality's grey areas. They are not going to think critically- they will likely end up like you, making decisions all their lives on the basis on "it has always been so".

So this brings me to the question- would I ever accept a homophobic child? Well, I would probably be disappointed that he/she did not grasp the concept of love and acceptance, and worried for the LGBT people my child would *most* likely encounter at some point in life. But at least, I want to be able to tell myself that this kid is well-informed about the LGBT in Singapore, has weighed both sides of the argument, and came to that decision not to accept them on his/her own accord. NOT because the only thing they know about the LGBT is that they are evil and spread AIDS. (Neither is true, by the way)