Prof. Thio Li-ann
via AsiaOneAn anti-gay law professor and politician from Singapore who had been invited to teach a course at New York University on “Human Rights in Asia” won’t accept the invitation, the school announced yesterday.
Thio Li-ann, a professor at the National University of Singapore and a former member of that country's Parliament, had been scheduled to teach the human rights course and a seminar on constitutionalism as a visiting professor at NYU’s law school, Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
But the invitation caused outrage on NYU’s campus because of statements she’s made about homosexuality, particularly during parliamentary debate on the repeal of Section 377A, the Victorian-era law that criminalizes gay sex in Singapore.
More than 740 people have signed an online petition saying that, by hiring her, the law school was “acting in opposition to its own policy of nondiscrimination and undermining its commitment to advancing human rights worldwide.”
The petition calls the invitation extended to Thio by NYU “disingenuous, untenable, and unacceptable.” It says “academic freedom is not a license for bigotry.”
NYU announced yesterday that Thio had withdrawn in a statement sent to the New York Times and to a law issues blog that has been at the center of the controversy that erupted after the invitation was announced.
The statement signed by NYU law dean Richard Revesz says Thio decided to decline the invitation because “she was disappointed by the hostility of some members of our community to her views regarding homosexuality and gay rights, and by the low enrollments in her classes.”
Anti-gay Singapore prof won’t be teaching ‘human rights’ at NYU [contd.]
NYU Students and faculty opposed to her appointment pointed out that as a member of parliament, Thio strongly opposed the repeal of section 377, the colonial-era law that criminalizes sex between men.
During parliamentary debate on section 377, she said homosexuality is a “gender identity disorder” and anal sex is like “shoving a straw up your nose to drink.” Repealing the law “is the first step of a radical, political agenda which will subvert social morality, the common good and undermine our liberties,” she said, according to ABA Journal.
As a member of parliament, she also supported her government’s imposition of a fine on a Singaporean television station for showing a gay couple on a home-remodeling show. Singapore’s censors fined the station for “promoting homosexuality” because, they said, “The episode contained several scenes of the gay couple with their baby as well as the presenter's congratulations and acknowledgement of them as a family and their child as a family unit.”
In her own defense, Thio last weekend issued a long memo in which she attacked her detractors at NYU. “I am a little tired of the torrent of abuse and defamation that I have been receiving, and blatant emotive misrepresentations of my position.”
She complained, “I do not feel welcomed as a person; I feel unfairly treated and greatly disrespected.”
In the memo, she insisted that she has been the victim, "My objection is not to gay people,” she claimed; “it is towards the nature of the homosexual political agenda and the vicious and degrading tactics of some activists (like insults and death threats). What I object to is the coloring of any principled moral opposition to homosexuality as ‘bigoted’ and ignorance or ‘hatred’.”
Thio’s speech in parliament against repeal of section 377 became the centerpiece of opposition to the NYU invitation.
Thio insisted in her memo last weekend that the focus is unfair. “I am tired of this obsessive and narcissistic obsession with ONE of the speeches I made during my 2.5 years tenure in Parliament,” she wrote.
Revesz said in the statement released yesterday that neither he nor the panel that recommended Thio had been aware of her views, but it wrestles with the tension between academic freedom and the school’s commitment to gay rights.
“The position taken in the speech should have been irrelevant to our evaluation of Professor Thio, although the argumentation supporting the position might properly have played a role in that evaluation,” Revesz wrote in the statement.
It concludes, however, that the “analytic cogency” of Thio’s argument against the bill, if it had been known, might have relevant in deciding whether to hire her, ABA Journal reports.
“Professor Thio's position in that speech is inimical to the law school's position against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” Revesz wrote. “Nonetheless, I do not believe that Professor Thio's opposition to our institutional position should have played any role in our evaluation of her. Leading academic institutions benefit greatly from a diversity of perspectives, not from hiring only people who share the same views.”
Source: Singaporean Scholar, a Foe of Gay Rights, Cancels Plans to Teach at NYU - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education