SINGAPORE (AP) -- Singapore's founding leader Lee Kuan Yew has
questioned the city-state's ban on gay sex, saying the government
should not be the moral police on the issue, a newspaper
reported.
"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," Lee was
quoted as saying in The Straits Times newspaper. "So why should we
criminalize it?"
Under proposed changes to its legislation, Singapore will
decriminalize oral and anal sex for adult heterosexuals, but will
keep a ban on gay sex. The amendments are scheduled to be debated
in Parliament later this year.
But Lee, who was prime minister from 1959 until 1990 and remains
influential in the current government under the title of "Minister
Mentor," also said the government could not ignore conservative
views, the report said.
"I think we pragmatically adjust, carry our people ... don't upset
them and suddenly upset their sense of propriety and right and
wrong," Lee told a group of young activists from the ruling
People's Action Party, according to the paper. "But at the same
time let's not go around like this moral police ... barging into
people's rooms. That's not our business."
"You have to take a practical, pragmatic approach to what I see is
an inevitable force of time and circumstance," he reportedly
said.
Lee's press secretary at the Prime Minister's Office could not
immediately be reached Monday to confirm his remarks.
Gay sex, defined by the Southeast Asian city-state as "an act of
gross indecency," is punishable by a maximum of two years in jail.
There have been few prosecutions.
