SATIRE | I was alarmed to learn about the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia’s decision to approve ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Power Rangers’ for release. Uncut. These films are nothing more than Trojan horses for the alleged homosexual agenda.

Abdul Halim Abdul Hamid, chairperson of the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia, said: “Malaysia does not recognise the LGBT ideology, so we have to be extra cautious in our work. If we let these scenes pass, people will wonder if Malaysia recognises LGBT.”

Deputy Home Minister NurJazlan Mohamed articulated another concern:“Any films on LGBT, the government will not allow because the elements portrayed in the movie could influence us.”

Yet these films are being released without any cuts.

Our gatekeepers have failed us. Other nations will indeed wonder if Malaysia is giving in to the ‘homosexual agenda’. Our own people will begin to question their sexuality. It is worth asking why it is that our censors, who have a duty to protect us, have essentially welcomed foxes into the hen house.

Some speculated that it was because a vocal minority of westernised Malaysians raised hell on social media. This only gets to part of the truth. The truth lies in the nature of these morally corrosive films.

The job of the censor is to watch cinematic filth packed with scandal, profanity, violence, promiscuity, homosexuality, feminism - day in and day out - and to act as either a surgeon in removing certain tumours, or a soldier in keeping the enemy out entirely. This is a task for no ordinary man.

The censor must be of a moral and intellectual calibre superior to the average Malaysian. He must be a man of faith, for morality is the premise of the divine. He must have an advanced understanding of the cinematic arts in all its forms, and the discernment to recognise when that art is being hijacked for other agendas. He must have the courage to weather the anger of the masses when he denies them their foolish impulses.

But he is, above all, a man.

How can we expect any man to stand firm in the face of constant, daily temptation? Surely his moral compass is bound to go askew with time. Think about how Jesus was tempted in the desert by Satan for only forty days. The censor’s job is to bear a burden even Jesus did not bear for months, for years. No matter how upstanding he may be at the outset, the job will eventually render him as sullied as used toilet paper.

If the duty of an organisation such as the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia is to protect Malaysians from the immoral, then it needs to do the same for its censors. It is clear, given the shocking greenlighting of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Power Rangers’, that they have been morally compromised.

Censors are the first line of defense we citizens have against the immoral. Our first line of defence needs its own first line of defence.

We need a censorship board for the censorship board

One could argue a painless policy solution might be term limits - say a censor only has the job for two years. But that is like drug addicts sharing needles: the disease of corrupted ideologies will spread as former censors return to the general population. Every individual is different. Different censors are likely to have varying levels of tolerance for the influence of cinematic poison.

In addition, some censors may fall through the cracks and cut or ban a perfectly acceptable film by mistake. Films not only have the potential to entertain us, but also to inspire us, comfort us, and challenge us to accept the reality with which we are presented. The task of the movie censor is too critical to allow for mistakes.

No, the way forward is the creation of a censorship board for the censorship board. The new board must be cut from a better cloth than the previous board, and have a profound understanding of their colleague’s individual tolerance levels to make necessary cuts with surgical precision. These people need to be extraordinary. And so extraordinary measures will need to be taken.

The new board should be raised separately from other regular citizens, removed from their families and communities and schools at birth, and placed in a highly structured but nurturing environment (probably somewhere in Ipoh). Instead of parents, they will have the best philosophers and teachers and resources in the world raising them, correcting them, training them to be the best possible censors. I suspect they will be ready for service by the age of eighteen.

Nevertheless, given the universal tendency for human error, it is fair to suppose we will also need a censorship board for the censorship board for the censorship board. Who is worthy to be a censor for a censor for a censor? Who is worthy to make that judgement? Who watches the watchmen? Where will it end?

But these questions are absurd. As a practical matter, that is a logistical and ethical nightmare. A far more relevant question would be: will the moral purity of Malaysians be intact if harmful scenes and movies alone are removed? Of course not.

This is why we need censors for the Internet, books, magazines, music, university professors, students, activists, lawyers, swimming pools, musical performance dress codes, and opposition politicians. Fences make good neighbours, as they say, and good censors make good citizens.

Let none accuse us of being uncultured Philistines. We are not going to ban everything, least of all every movie. We Malaysians have great respect for our religion, our king, our country, and our GDP. In that order.

The movie industry generates revenue for distribution companies and shopping malls and contributes to the tourist experience and creates countless jobs across the country. Who are we to chip away at the nation’s GDP?

More importantly, we are human beings. It is human to enjoy the arts. And I am sure it is the will of God, who created us with the amazing capacity for reason and moral action, that censors reason and act for us instead.

ETHAN TAN is a candidate for a master of science in social policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He's a Malaysian married to an American, and misses banana leaf rice very much (even if he loves his wife's cooking).

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.