Forum - View topicINTEREST: Speak Out! Japan's LGBTQ+ Community Responds to Politician Sugita's Discriminatory Stateme
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
|
||
|
This article touches on important points that should be dealt with more calm and composure than just a reaction using our 21st century western liberal morality standards.
In my impression the concept of free speech includes speech that one might regard as offensive. If we ban all speech that someone might regard as offensive we will essentially ban all sophisticated forms of political discussion and be in a state of dictatorship. Being an asexual myself I personally found the remarks by Sugita to be quite repugnant in it's language but they also touch on a valid social issue. That social issue is a universal problem of pooling public pension programs. These pension programs use the taxes paid by the working age people to support retired elderly people. The problem is that this kind of program provides incentives for people to not have kids and if nobody has kids there will not be working age people to pay the taxes to support the elderly in the future. Before the development of public pension systems (like the US social security system) people's children were their main retirement fund: when they became elderly they expected their own family to support them. But with public pension system elderly people can just use the taxes paid by the other people's kids to support themselves in the future. Since raising kids entails in a huge personal cost many people just choose to not have kids anymore. As a result we have many countries were people are not having enough kids to maintain the financial viability of their social programs, which includes Japan. Sugita remark was wrong mainly because it is mostly a problem of straight people and not LGBT or asexual people since the former consist of about 95% of the population so if 5% of people don't have kids that will not have a significant impact on the overall population. Also, LGBT people can easily adopt kids and since their fraction in the population is small they can be used help to raise kids born from straight parents anyway so being a member of the LGBT category does not really contribute to this social problem. So instead of complaining about LGBT people what Japan must do is to reform their tax system to provide higher incentives for people to have kids. For instance, providing a substantial reduction in income taxes for each kid a couple might choose to raise (including by adoption) plus allowing LGBT couples to also benefit from those incentives if they adopt kids (by for instance, legalizing gay marriage). |
|||
|
|||
|
Jhechav
|
|
||
|
Just wanted to say I loved reading this article and also loved that ANN posted. I don't really have anything to contribute, but I still wanted to give my appreciation to the author and the people have a constructive dialogue.
Also, I agree with all of what you said. |
|||
|
Lord Oink
Posts: 876 |
|
||
Isn't that what leads to people having more kids to collect more welfare checks? |
|||
|
|||
|
Jhechav
|
|
||
That's always a possibility, but I don't think it's right to restrict entire groups of people from getting support to adopt/have kids simply because the system will get abused. Instead, build a better system. |
|||
penguintruth
 Posts: 8459 Location: Penguinopolis |
|
||
|
Kind of bums me out that the Dragon Quest musical composer is like that.
|
|||
|
|||
|
Random Name
Posts: 644 |
|
||
|
I'll never understand why people care how other people choose to live their lives. It's the same toxic mentality of I don't like something so no one should...that line of thinking just needs to die.
|
|||
|
|||
|
wccw2399
Posts: 29 |
|
||
|
Before i go too far, i'm asking this question in as sincere and genuinely curious and a way that i can be respectful as good as i can, But What exactly is a queer person? (i apologize if this is worded badly or sounds bad i don't know any other way to word it) And what's the difference between them and the other people with in the LGBT community?
|
|||
|
|||
|
AiddonValentine
Posts: 2203 |
|
||
|
Sugita's comments are depressingly entrenched in a lot of Japanese culture. Reminds me of Ishihara claiming menopausal women should leave the country because they can't have children.
|
|||
|
|||
|
BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5914 |
|
||
Sure hope he's not a graduate from Tokyo Medical University. |
|||
|
|||
|
Zimmer
Posts: 178 |
|
||
|
|||
|
|||
Scherzo
 Posts: 149 |
|
||
Liberal has very different connotations outside of North America; generally it's used to describe Centrist/Center-Right parties with a focus on free trade and property rights. |
|||
|
|||
|
penguintruth
Posts: 8459 Location: Penguinopolis |
|
||
|
The Democrats aren't very liberal over here, either. Or, at least, the Democrats aren't very left.
|
|||
|
|||
Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
|
||
|
I am heartened by this response to wrong hearted, cruel words by an ignorant politician.
But, wait, hold up Japan has a history of forcibly sterilizing disabled people, including Deaf people??? I did not know that! I knew that America still has forcible [url=http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/]sterilization laws technically on the books (Buck vs. Bell was never overturned) that were used against disabled people, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinxs, Asian Americans, and other minorities, including, as recently as the mid-aughts,, women in California prisons. It is so disheartening to read that this evil, eugenics policy was used against disabled people in Japan, too. It makes me wonder how many countries have had, or even still have, forced sterilization policies, and how many people were forcibly sterilized by their governments. |
|||
|
|||
|
Gemnist
Posts: 1757 |
|
||
|
It’s honestly not that surprising that Japan is this regressive in terms of LGBTQ situations, given what we see in their media. With all due respect to people that like it, I’ve always looked at yaoi and yuri, and really seen nothing but voyeuristic fantasies for their target audiences, which is really shaming on those who use it as such. Not to mention actual LGBTQ characters are often treated as deviant and hostile (such as in Code Geass, where a girl is told to “go back to your closet” after saying she wanted to kiss another girl in Episode 6, and of course the Nina Einstein character did a lot of things to piss off the audience). Even One Piece - the biggest manga/anime franchise ever - portrays gay men as cross dressing drag queens who lack all sense of privacy.
As for the real world, one thing that stuck out for me was Sugita’s full reasoning for being anti-LGBTQ, namely that they aren’t productive to society because they can’t make children. As someone who’s been to Japan within the last month, I know that East Asia tends to prioritize the group over the individual, in contrast to Western society, but this is honestly taking it way too far. LGBTQ people can still work and be productive, and there are already plenty of people around (121 million) to where you really don’t need to require people to make children. |
|||
|
|||
|
Katsuragi222
Posts: 2 |
|
||
Because it is a conservative party, the English name is just a bit odd. In Japanese it is 自由民主党 Jiyū-Minshutō https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_(Japan) |
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group