OK, I know it’s campaign season here in Taiwan, and politicians want to fire up their supporters. But are statements like this really necessary?
[Ministry of Education Secretary-General Chuang Kuo-jung] has become a household name because of his snappy comebacks and caustic remarks about the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its top leaders, including calling presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) "sissies," "gay-like" and "wimps."
You wouldn’t walk up to a semi-reformed ex-convict and question HIS manhood, would you? Well in a way, the KMT is a bit like that ex-con. The party doesn’t behave as badly as it used to, but it’s hardly a model of what a loyal opposition should look like, either. Ultimately, the KMT didn’t use violence* when the sign on the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial in Taipei was recently changed over its objections to "Liberty Plaza" – and as a reward, its leaders were called a bunch of effeminate pansies! Good grief, do the pro-independence parties really want to ENCOURAGE the KMT to bust heads during future confrontations of this sort?
Naturally, homosexual organizations and women’s groups were outraged. This kinda took the cake, though:
[Lai Yu-mei, secretary-general of the Taiwan Gender Equity Education Association,] said schoolteachers have complained about Chuang. "We’ve been receiving a lot of protest phone calls every day," she continued, "and most of the teachers were disgusted and didn’t know how they could teach children with Chuang setting such a bad example." [emphasis added]
Ya don’t know how to do your job when politicians in the background start talkin’ trash? Here’s an idea: Why doncha just suck it up and TEACH instead of whining about it…ya pantywaists.
(Oooo. Sure hope all those bad-ass schoolteachers don’t get all medieval on me now. Heavens to Mergatroid, they could keep me after class and make me write a hundred lines on the blackboard yet!)
* I am assuming here that the KMT supporter who drove his truck over 6 people during the name-change stand-off was nothing more than a deranged individual acting on his own.