Reporters Without Orders

I would have commented on this article by J.M. Cole on the current gay marriage protests in Taipei, but comments are only permitted from faceborg accounts, so I comment here instead. There are a couple of problems with Cole reporting on this topic and they are (1) he is an LGBT activist himself, and (2) he is an advocate of hate speech legislation, which together indicate that he would prefer that the protesters he is reporting on were silenced by the State.

As a member of the self-appointed Opinion Police, he cannot therefore be trusted to report on the anti-gay marriage protests accurately and honestly.

Specifically, he fails to report on whether the protesters hold the one objection to gay marriage with which I would agree and that is the infringement upon freedom of association in the form of anti-discrimination laws under which churches could face legal action for refusing to marry homosexual couples. Note that this point is not an objection to the legalization of gay marriage per se, but to the particular form such legislation would take, specifically the anti-discrimination corollary. 

Instead, Cole merely attributes to the protesters a list of dubious arguments against gay marriage so that readers may dismiss them as bigots, which is no doubt the purpose of his report. I do not agree with those arguments and have no objection to gay marriage itself, but only to the anti-discrimination laws that go with it and the underlying and entirely asinine claim that marriage is a "human right", just because the U.N. says so. Moreover, Mr Cole's unsuitability to report on this particular subject without strict editorial orders about balance is an indication that the Hong Kong Free Press is about as flaky and untrustworthy as the New York Times proved to be in its' 90+% near-certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the recent U.S. presidential election.

Update: more here, with a comment from me under the article.