Malaysia plans increased sentences for gays
Two Malaysian states are planning to increase their penalties for homosexuality, just a week after organisers of a gay arts festival were forced to cancel the event in Kuala Lumpur when police threatened a crackdown.
Homosexuality is punishable by law in Malaysia by caning and up to 20 years in jail, but religious authorities in the states of Pahang and Malacca are planning legal amendments that would give the Government additional ammunition, Reuters reports.
If the proposed changes came into force, a Muslim found guilty of homosexual acts could be punished under both federal and state religious charges, meaning that jail terms could run consecutively, resulting in lengthier sentences.
The new penalties would apply not only to gays but those who support them, according to Malacca Islamic Religious Department chairman and Chief Minister Mohd Ali Rustam.
“We want to put it in the enactment so that we can enforce it and bring them to our sharia [Islamic law] court. Then we can charge them for promoting or supporting these illegal activities,” he said.
In April this year, Malaysian authorities have sent 66 Muslim schoolboys to a gay ‘cure’ camp after school teachers identified them as being effeminate.
The four-day camp provided the boys with counselling on masculine behaviour and discouraged them from being gay, according to a education director from Terengganu state.
Gay rights advocates denounced the camp and saw it as a symptom of widespread homophobia in this Muslim-majority country.
The camp was meant “to guide them back to the right path in life before they reach a point of no return,” state official Razali Daud told The Associated Press.
“Such effeminate behavior is unnatural and will affect their studies and their future.”
It was the first such program in the conservative state.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd called on Commonwealth nations to end laws targeting sexual minorities at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth last month.
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And Labor wanted to send GLBTI refugees to Malaysia so they can be tortured further. Labor has no brain or heart.
The threat to imprison homosexuals because we are homosexual is an open declaration of war against us as a breed. It will be interesting to see whether Malaysian homosexuals ever see fit to dob themselves in en masse as they once began to do in protest in Tasmania, before it soon became apparent that there were not enough prisons or prison places to accommodate anything like the entire homosexual population of Tasmania.
With the present population of Malaysia at 28,728,6070, and taking as reasonable LGBT proportion of the population at 5% (based on US Census exit polls of openly gay 2004 and 2008, plus 1% for closeted, averaged with UK polling at 6%) gives us 1,436,430 men+women+children. Divide that by 2 to eliminate children and elderly, and you have population of potentially three quarters of a million Malaysian homosexual citizens to imprison.
The current prison population of Malaysia is 39,258, with an overcrowding rate of over 22%. What would a country that can’t even house 40,000 prisoners do with 700,000 additional prisoners?
If it turned nasty and they called in the army, then the 700,000 LGBT Malaysians might have to fight the Malaysian military, of 110,000 active soldiers. Many LGBT would already be in the military. Many would have supporters who were straight.
LGBT Malaysians being all in the closet could organise themselves in secret and then surprise everyone when the arrests began.
They simply don’t know their own power. LGBT are minority, but they eclipse the prison system by almost 20 to 1 and the military by at least 7 to 1. One has to wonder why they do not rise up as one against their oppressors.