My Take | Would Confucius condone same-sex marriage?

There is a row brewing between Hong Kong’s arch-conservative lawmaker Junius Ho Kwan-yiu and one of the most prolific letter writers to the South China Morning Post, Mark Peaker. In one of his many letters to this newspaper now collected in a book titled Peaker of the Peak, the former banker told Ho to shut up and apologise over his vocal opposition to LGBTQ rights.

Ho was incensed and co-wrote a long opinion piece in China Daily rebutting Peaker, citing Confucianism and Confucian values. Let me just say I never have much interest in LGBTQ rights. Call me a simpleton but my position is that whom you want to sleep with and marry is none of my business. And you are free to choose your own self-identifying pronouns. You name them, I use them.

But the question as to whether Confucius and/or Confucianism condemns same-sex marriage does interest me, purely as philosophical, historical and sociological questions. But first, let’s be fair to Ho. I don’t think he is going after LGBTQ people in their own bedrooms to lock them up. He is making the case against institutional and legal support for LGBTQ rights in Hong Kong.

Titled “Heterosexual-marriage system is a sacred Confucian tradition”, the pair wrote: “As a lawmaker in a cosmopolitan city, Ho has an obligation to make it clear that the vast majority of Chinese people in Hong Kong have been brought to believe, and do believe, that the Confucian heterosexual marriage system is sacred. Ho also has a sacred obligation to guard against the invasion of any corrosive and negative cultures spread by same-sex marriage. In particular, he will try his best to close the door to any possibility of letting the heterodox culture of same-sex marriage corrupt the minds of our young people.”

Without arguments, Ho and his co-writer simply claimed Chinese/Hong Kong society is Confucian and that by extension, it must reject same-sex marriage because Confucianism does. As a lifelong student of philosophy, I think I can safely say that none of these claims are obvious, but are highly contested. Ho spends half of his article citing, if you can believe it, English common law, the US Bill of Rights, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, even Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and US Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes, to defend his right to condemn LGBTQ rights.