malaysiakini: Bishop rails against selective morality..... by Terence Netto

Bishop rails against selective morality

Terence Netto
Apr 5, 2011
6:06pm

 

Catholic Bishop Paul Tan Chee Ing denounced as “morally squalid” and “indefensible” the inaction of the secular authorities over the screening of the video allegedly depicting Anwar Ibrahim in a sexual transaction with a woman.

“When the secular authorities abdicated their responsibility to deal with those responsible for the screening, their inaction beget further evil,” said the titular head of the Malacca-Johor diocese, in comments to Malaysiakini on the circulation of a two-minute clip purportedly from a video depicting the opposition leader having sex with a woman that was screened to a select audience two weeks ago.

In latest developments, the wife and children of Anwar Ibrahim said they have seen the two-minute clip and have publicly denied that the person depicted as having sex in the videotape is the PKR de facto leader.

Commenting on this, Bishop Tan, who is also president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, said: “Now that the public has heard from the family, it is incumbent on the authorities to take action against those who screened the video. "Who would know best if the man shown is Anwar or not except his wife and children?”

Elaborating, Tan asserted: “You cannot prevaricate in the face of an evil action that is so clear a violation of the laws.”

“It is morally squalid for people empowered with the civil authority to waffle in the face of transparent evil.

“Their dithering is indefensible. Where the secular authority is supinely weak in the face of evil, it is the duty of the religious authorities to speak up, as otherwise, society would be in mortal peril from the pollution to its morals.

“I have said before that our society is in greater danger from our negligence than from our ignorance,” he said.

“The authorities were negligent in not charging those who publicly purveyed the video in the first place. Now you have fragments from it circulating on the net. One evil leads to another,” lamented the Catholic leader.

Bishop Tan held that the sex video is not a political issue.

“It is first a moral issue before it is anything else. There are clear laws for dealing with it. To ignore the need for their enforcement is to invite the kind of moral confusion from which rescue would be difficult,” he said.

The bishop urged the civil authorities to eschew selective morality, which he said would only spawn “ethical quagmires from which society could only emerge at great cost”.