I would like to comment on the moral selectiveness of churches in Singapore and Malaysia, and start off by briefly touching on the controversial election of openly gay bishop, Canon Gene Robinson, as the Bishop of New Hampshire by the Anglican Church in America.

The election was achieved through the Episcopal Church's House of Deputies, composed of clergy and lay people. The current head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop Rowan Williams, has rightly commented that this decision is bound to have serious and long term repercussions in the Anglican Church and the Christian community worldwide.

More conservative Anglicans have reacted negatively to the outcome. For example, leader of the Anglican Church of West Malaysia, Bishop Dr Lim Cheng Ean has claimed that in countries like Malaysia, it is not only contrary to Scripture teaching, but also not conducive in our environment.

The issue of homosexuality has been a controversial one in the Anglican community since the Lambeth conference of 1998, where the issue of homosexuality predominated and the church voted overwhelming against any relaxation of the scriptural interpretation prohibiting homosexuality. The Asian Anglican churches were amongst those who voted against a different interpretation.

First off into my comments, I would like to iterate what is commonly accepted knowledge among the vast majority of mental health professionals the world over: homosexuality is a normal and healthy way of sexual expression amongst a minority of human beings.

A 1994 statement by the American Psychological Association goes:

Homosexuality is neither mental illness nor moral depravity. It is simply the way a minority of our population expresses human love and sexuality ... Studies of judgment, stability, reliability, and social and vocational adaptiveness all show that gay men and lesbians function every bit as well as heterosexuals. Nor is homosexuality a matter of individual choice. Research suggests that the homosexual orientation is in place very early in the life cycle, possibly even before birth. It is found in about ten percent of the population, a figure which is surprisingly constant across cultures, irrespective of the different moral values and standards of a particular culture. Contrary to what some imply, the incidence of homosexuality in a population does not appear to change with new moral codes or social mores. Research findings suggest that efforts to repair homosexuals are nothing more than social prejudice garbed in psychological accoutrements.

The best overall summary of most respected researchers is that homosexuality (like most other psychological conditions) is due to a combination of social, biological, and psychological factors. As far as I am aware, this is the official stance adopted by all psychiatric/psychological associations in the West and increasingly by most other developing countries as well (including Malaysia).

From the viewpoint of history, it appears that a lot of Christians have yet to learn from the past mistakes of the Church. For example, in 2000, the Pope, to his credit, offered a public apology for the past abuses of power, including infamous incidences such as the Inquisition and the Crusades, where tens of thousands of innocents were tortured and killed.

In the 19th century, a large majority of Protestant Christians in America supported slavery and used numerous quotations from the bible to justify their support. The Quakers were amongst the first Christians to oppose slavery, but it was only John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, who was able to convert the small Quaker protest into a mass abolition movement.

Incidentally, the Quakers were also amongst the first Christian denominations to recognize gay members, clergy and marriage. Only quite recently, the issue of equality of men and women and ordination of women clergy has been quite contentious. For example, the Lambeth Conference of 1988 discussed this issue which finally permitted women to operate at the highest hierarchies of the Anglican church.

The large majority of modern Western theologians, with a century of rigorous biblical analysis behind them, agree that it is very difficult to transfer the message of a series of books written several thousand years ago to our own day without allowing for the yawning social and cultural gulf which separates us from the original writers.

Unfortunately, the most recent biblical scholarship in the West is still largely unavailable to newly growing churches in Asia and Africa, which includes Malaysia as well.

It is my observation that when conservative Christians are confronted with these past abuses by the Church, they respond by saying that the people who participated in these abuses were not really Christians, but misquoted the Bible out of context to justify their inhumane acts.

Ironically, they then go on to insist that their interpretation of the Bible with regards to homosexuality is however correct, although it flies in the face of all modern scientific research and promotes intolerance towards gay people.

It is also a great pity that many Malaysian Christians who are able to adopt a very rational, humane and critical approach when dealing with other issues in life suddenly degenerate into over-simplistic morality when considering issues of sexuality.

From the viewpoint of Chinese culture (which I am from), there is an overwhelming misconception that homosexuality is a `deviant' element borrowed from the West. In fact, recent research on love poems, dynastic histories and erotic stories has shown that homosexual behaviour was very much a feature in all levels of Chinese society, where it went through differing levels of toleration or opposition throughout China's turbulent history.

A strong argument could be made that the actual 'deviant' element introduced primarily through Western missionaries in China is the homophobia that is currently prevalent in many Chinese societies. More details in Chinese can be found for example in Samshasha's Zhongguo Tongxingai Shilu (Chinese Homosexual Histories), available in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Last but not least, I would like to urge people like Bishop Dr Lim Cheng Ean and other like-minded Christians to consider very carefully and deeply about what they feel is the core message that the Bible is trying to convey.

To me, this is the redeeming love of Christ to all peoples of the world, which includes the need to engage others in compassion regardless of how unnatural they may seem to us and the humility of acknowledging that only God is in full understanding of all matters.

Keep in mind that gay Christians are not asking for tolerance of sexual promiscuity, but rather acceptance of a loving, monogamous relationship. Canon Jeffrey John has been with his partner for 27 years, Canon Gene Robinson has been with his for 13 years (and I hope I will be with mine for equally that long).

I would like to quote a small passage from an official statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury:

• Our official policies and resolutions as Anglicans commit us to listening to the experience of homosexuals and recognising that they are full and welcome members of the Church, loved by God. Not everyone, it seems, takes equally seriously this element in the teaching of the Anglican Church; and some letters that came from non-believers suggest that the level of foolish and hurtful prejudice in our society is still uncomfortably high. Christians who collude with this are simply not living out their calling.

With that I conclude by extending my prayers, hope and support to all my gay Christian brothers and sisters in Malaysia. May the light of God's truth prevail in the ignorance and prejudice that surrounds this difficult issue.