Government officials in Malaysia have expressed outrage over the plans of a prominent gay Malaysian to marry in New York — and celebrate the wedding back in his home country.
The Rev. Ouyang Wen Feng, a Chinese-Malaysian pastor who has lived in the United States since 1998, said on Tuesday that after he married his partner of roughly two years at the end of this month, the couple would travel to Malaysia for a wedding banquet, The Associated Press reported.
The move is likely to further inflame conservative officials in Malaysia, where Muslims are in the majority. Since the planned wedding in New York was announced last week, government officials and newspaper columnists have fumed that the union would harm Malaysian society.
“Day by day we see various attempts to destroy our value system and Pastor Ou is doing it in the open,” a columnist wrote in Utusan Malaysia, a conservative daily owned by the ruling party, according to a translation by the Web site the Malaysian Insider. The columnist added that Mr. Ouyang’s “attempt to break this value system to marry the same gender in this country has to be opposed. In fact the government has to act to block him.”
The country’s Islamic Affairs minister, Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom, said on Sunday that “social problems” would arise if such “extreme human rights” were permitted. “I think it will encourage liberalism in Malaysia and this understanding is worrisome,” he told reporters.
The couple plan to wed in New York on Aug. 31 — the Malaysian independence day — but a date for the banquet in Malaysia has not been announced. New York legalized gay marriage this summer and began marrying same-sex couples in late July.
In 2006, Mr. Ouyang, who also goes by his birth name, Ngeo Boon Lin, became the first public figure in Malaysia to come out about his sexual orientation, according to a biography on the Web site of the Metropolitan Community Church, a mostly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender congregation in New York. In addition to his pastoral work, he is also a journalist and has written a column for the Sin Chew Daily, the largest Chinese-language paper in Malaysia.
But the Malaysian authorities have shown little tolerance for his message, or for public acceptance of homosexuality. Earlier this year, the country’s leading private radio broadcaster censored portions of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” because they were perceived to be offensive. “The issue of being gay, lesbian or (bisexual) is still considered as a ‘taboo’ by general Malaysians,” the broadcaster, AMP Radio Networks, said in a statement at the time.
Mr. Ouyang, 41, who grew up in a conservative Christian household in Malaysia and is currently traveling to Hong Kong to promote his book on homosexuality and Christianity, faces opposition from the country’s majority Muslim community as well as its Christian minority.
The National Evangelical Christian Fellowship, an umbrella organization of Malaysian churches, has opposed the planned union.
In 2007, Mr. Ouyang laid the groundwork for a church that would be accepting of openly gay congregants in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur. Mr. Ouyang was ordained in the United States that year.
“For some of us, especially our gay brothers and sisters, we have experienced firsthand that Christianity has been used to persecute minorities,” Mr. Ouyang said during his first service in Malaysia in 2007, before calling on the roughly 80 gays and lesbians in attendance to “reclaim our faith and celebrate our sexuality.”
Despite stiff opposition, Mr. Ouyang has continued to push for greater rights for gay Malaysians. This month he called on gay Malaysians to come out, saying that discrimination by the Malaysian government was based on “ignorance” and that staying in the closet would “perpetuate prejudice.”
But to do so takes courage. A Malaysian man who came out in a YouTube video in December was forced to take down the video, “Saya gay, saya okay,” after he received violent threats. Seksualiti Merdeka, a Malaysian gay advocacy group that helped post the video, explained the decision to remove the video and lamented that “so far nobody in authority has denounced the threats of violence.”
