Critical questioning

re: "Anchilee did more than break old stereotypes" (BP, December 14, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

Thank you Atiya Achakulwisut for the reminder that merely being a traditional belief or standard can never make any habit, custom, attitude, or law reasonable, fit for society, or just. What older generations might have accepted without question for no better reason than that they did not in fact question its propriety should not reign absent reason and good morals over the living generation who can critically question the received wisdom of past ages, as the Buddha in his Kalama Sutta so wisely counsels.

Compare with the once venerated tradition of slavery. In antebellum America, the strongest defence for retaining the traditional custom of slavery and the associated attitudes and laws of society was to protect society as it then was. As the zealous pro-slavery loyalist John C. Calhoun very clearly stated it in his 1837 speech “Slavery as a Positive Good,” whose title says it all: slavery was a long established tradition "grown up with our society and institutions and is so interwoven with them that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people.” And ultra-loyalist to the old ways that he was, Calhoun insisted with equal fervour that slavery was so far from being any evil to them as to be an absolute benevolence to the enslaved, who thereby received all the sufficiency of benefits forced upon them by their masters.

And in Thailand in 2021, the slavery-loyalist Calhoun's is exactly the same argument used to justify continuing the rule of inequality, prejudice and injustice over the LGBTQ portion of the Thai people. It is also exactly the same argument, an appeal to unspeakable tradition, unquestioned habits, and morally dubious values that are merely traditional that is used to justify similar injustice being protected by law from reform.

John C. Calhoun would be proud to see his arguments in defence of the traditional institution of slavery, so essential to the stability of the realm, being brought out to support the equally bigotted attacks on the LGBTQ and other portions of the Thai people who would free themselves and their nation from ancient shackles. Fortunately, Thailand has bright, informed, critically capable, and morally aware young citizens like Anchilee Scott-Kemmis to counter the ultra-conservative Calhouns of Thailand with their critically defective arguments in support of the morally indefensible.

 Felix Qui
 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

 
The text as edited was published in PostBag on December 15, 2021, under the title "Critical questioning" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2232095/critical-questioning