Vietnamese Deputy Health Minister Makes Formal Recommendation To Implement Marr

[attrayant]

This is last month's news but I didn't see a thread on it. http://m.union-bulletin.com/news/2013/apr/16/same-sex-marriage-should-be-legalized-vietnam/?

“As human beings, homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else to live, eat, love and be loved,” Nguyen Viet Tien told a government meeting discussing the upcoming review of the Marriage and Family Law, newspaper Thanh Nien said.The National Assembly is scheduled to discuss allowing same-sex marriage when the law is reviewed in May.

Viet Nam might get there before Thailand does.[edit] The thread title got truncated. "Marr" should be marriage equality. Edited May 14, 2013 by attrayant

[Scott]

I worked with Vietnamese Refugees after the Vietnam war and I remember trying to do refugee status determination on a young man who seemed quite obviously to be gay. He was quite unwilling to discuss any possible reasons for his mistreatment.

Curiously I asked some other Vietnamese people about being gay in Vietnam. There reply was "We don't have that disease yet." The idea seemed to be quite pervasive.

It seems they have come a long way.

[LeCharivari]

Actually its last year's news, as the review of the law due this month was suggested by the Justice department last July - there seems to be little opposition and increasing support.

As I recall this was discussed here at some length, but it does at least confirm that the government are indeed reviewing the law, as they said they would.

.

Edited May 16, 2013 by LeCharivari

[LeCharivari]

I worked with Vietnamese Refugees after the Vietnam war and I remember trying to do refugee status determination on a young man who seemed quite obviously to be gay. He was quite unwilling to discuss any possible reasons for his mistreatment.

Curiously I asked some other Vietnamese people about being gay in Vietnam. There reply was "We don't have that disease yet." The idea seemed to be quite pervasive.

It seems they have come a long way.

"We don't have that disease yet" - sounds strangely like something Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would say, and very unlike the situation in Vietnam either then or now.

For the last couple of centuries homosexuality was far from accepted in Vietnam but was widely acknowledged as a social or mental "disease" - so much so that the French, during their near century of colonial rule and previous century of influence, nicknamed it the "Vietnam disease" as so many previously "normal" Frenchmen living in Vietnam became "diseased" and attracted to Vietnamese men. That it was considered a "social evil" under its various emperors, kings, lords and under colonial rule and then communism until this century is widely documented and probably due to the influence of Confucius and the importance of the family, but it is something that I have never seen denied until now and which I cannot find denied anywhere else.

While I am not doubting WHAT Scott was told, I think its important to question WHY he was told it as there is simply no reason for most Vietnamese to have denied that some "diseased" Vietnamese were homosexual - apart from refugees looking for asylum. Refugees, regardless of where they are from, don't just want to be accepted, they need to be accepted, literally, to gain refugee status and that means not being identified as having anything that could count against them. In the case of the Vietnamese refugees this would have included the "disease" of homosexuality, which they almost certainly would have thought was considered as much of a "disease" in America, Canada, Australia, etc, (with some justification at the time) as it was in Vietnam. They simply told anyone questioning them what they thought they wanted to hear.

I too "worked with Vietnamese Refugees", but 30 years ago so some time after the war. Of those I was responsible for from soon after their boats sank in the South China Sea to when they left for America, Australia and Norway, including making recommendations to the UNHCR in KL, I would say about half were "economic refugees" who simply said what they thought anyone questioning them wanted to hear in order to gain refugee status and get to the streets paved with gold, while the other half were 100% genuine and had suffered badly at the hands of the Viet Cong and then far worse at the hands of local pirates.

The Vietnamese certainly seem to have "come a long way", but rather than going from denial to acceptance they've gone from rejection to acceptance, which I think is a considerably bigger step.

[LeCharivari]

I worked with Vietnamese Refugees after the Vietnam war and I remember trying to do refugee status determination on a young man who seemed quite obviously to be gay. He was quite unwilling to discuss any possible reasons for his mistreatment.

Curiously I asked some other Vietnamese people about being gay in Vietnam. There reply was "We don't have that disease yet." The idea seemed to be quite pervasive.

It seems they have come a long way.

What is interesting in the context of homosexual Vietnamese, particularly in the Vietnam War era, is just how easy it is for us "Westerners" to mis-read and mis-label Asians as gay based on our idea of how we expect gays to be. John McCain, when interviewed in 1973 after his release and describing his Vietnamese captors and gaolers, said that "a lot of them were homosexual, although never towards us" - given the way that Vietnamese in general looked on homosexuals at the time nothing is likely to be further from the truth.