Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said last weekend that on the question of homosexuality, Singapore has to “take a practical, pragmatic approach to what I see is an inevitable force of time and circumstance.”

Some reports have cast his comments as suggesting that he believed decriminalisation should be moved forward. Reuters, for example, reported thus:

Singapore’s powerful former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, acknowledging the view that some people are genetically destined to be homosexual, has questioned the city-state’s ban on sex between men.

(Reuters, 23 April 2007, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew questions homosexuality ban)

If indeed this is so, People Like Us welcomes this long-awaited indicator of new thinking.

Lee’s exact words, reported in print and video by the Straits Times, were as follows:

You take this business of homosexuality. It raises tempers all over the world, and even in America. If in fact it is true – and I have asked doctors this – that you are genetically born a homosexual because that’s the nature of the genetic random transmission of genes, you can’t help it. So why should we criminalise it? But there’s such a strong inhibition in all societies – Christianity, Islam, even the Hindu, Chinese societies, and we are now confronted with a persisting aberration. But is it an aberration? It’s a genetic variation. So what do we do? I think we pragmatically adjust, carry our people. Don’t upset them and suddenly upset their sense of propriety and right and wrong. But at the same time let’s not go around like this moral police, barging into people’s rooms. That’s not our business. So you have to take a practical, pragmatic approach to what I see is an inevitable force of time and circumstance.

He had prefaced these remarks by saying that Singapore needed to keep abreast of the world.

You either go with the world and be part of the world or you will find that we become a quaint, quixotic, esoteric appendage of the world.

According to the Straits Times, Lee was speaking in answer to a question from Young PAP activist Loretta Chen, who had asked where censorship was headed in the next two decades. Young PAP is the youth wing of the People’s Action Party. The event was a gathering of this youth group at the St James Power Station, a trendy night spot, on 21 April 2007.

Especially as these comments were made extemporaneously, their meaning is open to interpretation. There remains considerable uncertainty as to what Lee had in mind when he spoke of taking a “practical, pragmatic approach” and not upsetting anti-gay groups’ “sense of propriety and right and wrong.”

People Like Us has long argued that equality for the GLBT minorities is more than just a matter of being practical. Fundamental rights are at issue. It is detrimental to fundamental conceptions of justice and equality as well as the constitutional development of Singapore not to respect these rights, whether with regard to GLBTs or other minorities.

Nonetheless, if the government thinks that it can sell the idea of decriminalisation – if indeed that was what Lee had at the back of his mind – through reliance on the argument of pragmatism, then so be it. The important thing is for the government to act. For many years now, it’s been one minister after another muttering words that have so far not translated into any meaningful change in policy or legislation. Enough.