The human rights discussion in S Korea is grossly hypocritical, as this week’s Seoul LGBT festival showed once again. SK’s first ‘human rights president’ said nothing, just as he has on N Korea HR and the Yemeni refugees in Jeju. Needless to say, the right here has nothing to /1
say on gay rights or the Yemenis either. Instead Moon has said he ‘does not like homosexuality,’ while Christian groups counter-protested LGBT day and call the Yemenis fake refugees. So the next time you hear that HR is a political tool for the SK right to attack N Korea, and /2
the SK left as commie traitors, while the SK left uses it to settle scores with regime opponents from the 70s and 80, and the Japanese from the war, that’s certainly how it looks. Disappointing that Moon Jae In does not take this more seriously given how central HR is to his /3
integrity. I figure the political calculation is that talking about NK HR will alienate Pyongyang from his detente efforts, while sticking up for gays will antagonize the right yet further when he needs some kind of center-right buy-into his detente if it is going to survive /4
the next conservative POTROK. And the Yemenis are Muslim refugees, which is all you need to say in our era of Trump. But given that a lot of Koreans were displaced by war once too, you’d think there’d be a little more sympathy and less (surprisingly harsh) vitriol; there’s /5
only 550 of them. Nice to see that the US ambassador to SK visited the LGBT festival, but I’m pretty sure Trump’s evangelical bloc will bring that up too when they learn of it. All in all, it’s been a pretty poor showing since 5/2017 on an issue Moon ostensibly cares about. END
