Wan Sou Hai ('Hard questions on gays', Nov 3) says, "Whilst the religious perspectives on this issue are clear as many religions are anti-gay, the constitutional, humanitarian and human rights issues are not that clear in our context."

I know our most enlightened prime minister said something to this effect. It does not mean it is accurate, or if at all, correct. It is typical of a homophobe such as he to utter such an ignorant statement, and what more, to an international audience. I hardly think Dr Mahathir Mohamad is any authority at all on the world's religions.

Let me be more precise. Let's look first at the key religions of Asia. Firstly there is no evidence at all that Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism is anti-gay. On the contrary, Buddhism recognises sexuality as only a manifestation of karma and does not prescribe right or wrong to any sexual preference.

Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vainata's recent study on same sex references in India's literary history ( Same sex love in India ) also reveals no bias against same sex love in the ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts.

Ironically, while Dr M will tell you homosexuality is a product of Western decadence, even the most basic research will reveal that it is homophobia that is the Western import, brought in by the colonial British and their Victorian "values".

In this respect, our laws on same sex offences are clinging on to a directly Western idea, an outdated one at that. How funny is that?

Now let's go on to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here the anti-gay element is derived from the texts of Lot, from which all three religions derive their inference of same sex activity as a sin.

However, how many people are aware of the counter-arguments backed by research and religious discourse that suggests the lessons in Lot have been distorted and misinterpreted to produce the kind of legitimised homophobia we see today?

Again, in studies such as Same sex unions in premedieval Europe , Islamic homosexualities , and elsewhere, it is suggested quite persuasively that Islam, of all the three, has been the most tolerant of same sex love. In the poetry that flourished in the 13th century there is much material that expounds same sex love, something I believe Dr Farish Noor touched on in his truly enlightened article ('Reaching out - gays and Islam', July 9).

Again the irony is that homophobia in Islam has been linked to politics related to Christianity in Europe and the Crusades.

In Japan, same sex love has been held in the highest esteem amongst the Samurai class. And elsewhere in the non-Western world, religions of smaller communities do not condemn same sex love, and in some cases, for example in the Pacific Islands, there are cultures which incorporate it as part of their cultural practice.

The biggest irony is that it is homophobia, not homosexuality, that has been imported from the West. It is the socially straightjacketed West which felt compelled to constrain natural relationships between people, whatever the sex, out of their own puritanical Christian sense of superior morality. This has been shown to have occurred across Asia, from Japan to the Middle East.

The problem is, in a world whose voice is dominated by the narrowly heterosexual, such realities are often obscured, as has happened to the literature and histories of Asian cultures over the past centuries. And it leads to such fallacious assumptions such as that uttered by our PM and commentators like the letter writer who do not know better.

To break one last fallacy, the second part of the sentence first quoted is still wrong. Human rights and constitution is not at all unclear on the rights of gays. Every human being deserves human rights, and deserves to be served by the Constitution. It is that simple.

The entire problem lies in the definition of "gay", again a Western concoction in terms of terminology, which emphasises a private activity as a definition, whereas in Asia we have simply lived as men or women with our private lives, no different from any other man or woman, all carrying out our own private affairs.

I felt this to be the most important point of the writer's letter, to re-educate the public on the real issues.

As for the bulk of our dear PM's utterances, it deserves to rest in the dung heap of all his other utterances that have spouted from his ignorant mouth. I shouldn't even want to dignify his infantilisms with a reply.

All I might say is that if Alexander the Great had arrived in Malaysia with his lover and army in tow, and heard what Dr M had to say about this, it might go down in history as the biggest joke of all time.