Lu Liping's homophobic 'tweets' spark a double edged debate
- By Gabrielle Pickard
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China.org.cn, July 7, 2011
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Lu Liping [File photo] |
The famous Chinese actress Lu Liping has sparked a micro blog war after she posted several anti-homosexual messages to her 125,000 followers on Weibo. The controversial comments described the homosexual community as being "shameful" and "sinners". The comments naturally led to a barrage of criticism and have ignited a double edged debate – the morality of homosexuality particularly homosexual marriage and the ethics surrounding micro blogs and 'freedom of speech.'
Lu Liping's remarks are antiquated, cruel and obsolete, and whilst the actress is within her right to make such comments to a potentially limitless audience on the World Wide Web, she is a fool to do so. Whilst Miss Liping, as her director husband Sun Haiying leaping to his wife's defence pointed out, is 'entitled to her own opinion,' in the same way you are taught from a young age not to mock and make fun of a person's physically defect, the colour of a person's skin, or for a person having a mental disability, there are some opinions, for the sake of not hurting others, that should be kept to themselves.
Lu Liping is in the prime of her acting career. She won the Best Actress title at last year's Golden Horse Awards and has been invited to the awards presentation ceremony in Taiwan this year as a guest of honour. Miss Liping's thriving career was at its pinnacle until she felt compelled to open her prejudice mouth on Weibo. Now the Golden Horse Awards' chairman Hou Hsiao-hsien has retracted Lu Liping's invitation to the awards, rightly stating, "The awards does not support any discriminatory speech," and the actress, who is obviously a household name in China has become as notorious in the west, although not because of her award-winning acting talents, but for being a bigoted homophobic that should know better.
I believe that Miss Liping's homophobic rants do not so much question the ethics of homosexuality – we are in the year 2011 for goodness sake, homosexuality is no longer a minority! – But more pressingly, it highlights the potentially injurious nature of micro blogs and social networking sites.
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