This is my response to the letter written by Dr Thio Su Mien and published in The Straits Times on May 18th, 2009. The letter can be found in it's original form here and reproduced on the new We-Are-Aware forums here. Please feel free to respond to it at the forum posting, as my post will also be posted in response in the thread. I will not be sending this in to The Straits Times, simply because that will give her the attention she apparently craves. We've given her enough of the public limelight.

Dr Thio's letter is just another piece of evidence that points to her anti-gay agenda. She has insisted that AWARE "had veered towards promoting the homosexual political agenda". The only examples that she can point out are AWARE's sponsorship of the Spider Lilies movie premiere in Singapore, the listings that says "homosexuality is neutral and normal" in the instructors' guide of the CSE, and the "vocal and vociferous" homosexual women who supported the "old guard", also calling them "sexually challenged".

These "evidence" are, in my not so humble opinion, flimsier than the ones Bush & Cheney used to start a war in Iraq, and the words used are no less inflammatory. The letter is designed to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, with scanty mentions of the law and a flip-flopping authority figure (MOE) in order to legitimise her false claims of a gay agenda, while providing no scientific or factual indication of why homosexuality is "wrong", or how sponsoring a movie premiere is the equivalent of promoting LGBT rights, or her equating homosexuals with "vocal and vociferous" and "sexually challenged".

This absence of proof, along with the absence of her personal motivations, makes her letter all provocation and no substance. Those familiar with the term "strawman argument" will see that it is what the letter is, and it is consistent with her views on LGBT rights. Her recent interview with Zaobao contains another manifestation of this strawman argument.

Letters like this one, and the recent astroturfing of NMP Siew Kum Hong because of the AWARE issue, shows that the only side interested in manipulating public opinion and pushing an agenda is the Christian extreme right. And the only agenda that is being pushed in the anti-gay agenda, with her fixation on attacking homosexuality, and the unsubstantiated libelous claims of her supporters against NMP Siew has tipped that same self-righteous, religious fervour into the political arena.

So who is promoting a "political agenda", again?