The People’s Crusade
An 800-strong protest march was the beginning of one new group’s effort to protect civil values from the designs of the religious right, writes Nigel Collett.
On Sunday, February 15, a new group took to the streets to protest against the fundamentalist Christian right’s growing voice in Hong Kong politics. The march occurred just a few weeks after 18-year-old Form 7 student Alva (or Aliber) Chun formed a group on Facebook named the Civic Movement Network (CMN), which rapidly gathered numbers of like-minded liberals (2,772 now and still rising) who have become very angry over the last few years at what they see as the lying and bullying behavior of the Christian right.
In early February, Chun and his 25-member organizing committee pledged that they would get more than 500 CMN supporters out on the streets within two weeks. On February 15, somewhere between 700 and 800 people marched from the Lai Chi Kok MTR station along Cheung Sha Wan Road to Boundary Street. They did so, they proclaimed before marching off, “to show their belief in a broad and open civic society and to fight the closed and insular society ruled by intolerance, misinformation and bigotry which the Christian right is seeking to impose on Hong Kong.”
The mission statement Chun drafted for CMN, which is on the Facebook site, expands further:
“We call ourselves ‘The Civic Movement Network.’ We come from many walks of life, including students, professionals, teachers and parents. Some of us believe in religion, others do not, but despite our differences we share a common belief. Together, we treasure the core values of our civic society—equality, human rights, democracy, rule of law, mutual dialogue, rational debate, tolerance, free and independent thinking, pluralism, transparent governance, care and concern for minorities and underprivileged groups, respect for an individual’s rights and freedom to choose their lifestyles in pursuit of their happiness as long as others are not harmed.”
The CMN is outraged by the way they believe Christian fundamentalists have tried to hijack recent public debates by appearing before Legco in a large number of ostensibly separate groups, so as to be accorded more time and attention than their real numbers warrant. There such groups have misrepresented the case for extending the Domestic Violence Ordinance to same-sex couples as a Trojan horse for same-sex marriage, and argued that the welfare of local children hinges on the widening of the Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance to cover the internet.
The CMN has also documented on its Facebook site examples of the way some fundamentalist Christians misuse their positions of authority in Hong Kong’s schools and social services. The Facebook site shows copies of letters handed out by fundamentalist teachers for their pupils and their parents to submit to Legco and the government in support of conservative Christian views, letters so similar in form to official school letters that parents have, according to the CMN, been duped into sending them in the belief that they were complying with the wishes of their children’s schools. The CMN has also started to collect details of cases in which teachers have publicly abused gays and lesbians.
