Over the last year, mostly Christian community groups have mobilized against the marriage-equality movement, warning, contrary to evidence, that same-sex partnerships are a threat to children, that giving LGBT families legal protection will hurt Taiwan.
They have also claimed—again, contrary to evidence—that protecting the rights of gender and sexual minorities is a Western idea, that being gay is somehow not “Chinese.” [...]
Yu Mei-nu, the legislator behind Taiwan’s most recent marriage-equality bill, was one of the human rights lawyers who struggled against one-party rule. She helped revise laws to guarantee the rights of women and, in 1986, represented a gay man suing for the right to marry. [...]
In recent months, concerned groups have reprised homophobic tropes about homosexuality, casting same-sex marriage as a gateway to incest, bestiality and AIDS. One group warned, without irony, that new marriage laws would lead to a future where “it’s possible to marry a ferris wheel.” [...]
At a hearing on marriage equality last month, Justice Minister Chiu Tai-san argued, in a court of law, that same-sex relationships are a “newly invented phenomenon” unlike “social norms and mechanisms formed by the people of our nation over the past thousand years” —leaving many people wondering what nation and norms he was referring to.
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