"The reason lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn't there the second time." - Willie Tyler
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Couple charged under Sedition Act
By Elena Chong
A COUPLE were charged on Tuesday with distributing a seditious publication to two others.
Ong Kian Cheong, 49, and Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 44, are alleged to have distributed The Little Bride, an evangelistic material, to Sembawang resident Irwan Ariffin last Oct 19.
They are also said to have distributed the same publication to one Madam Farharti Ahmad at her home in Woodlands on March 6 last year .
It is not clear why they face the Sedition Act and the Undesirable Publication Act when the publication is the same.
Ong, who works in a telecommunications company, and his wife, a bank employee, were represented by Mr Selva K. Naidu.
The police prosecutor sought an adjournment of the case pending a Health Sciences Authority on handwriting specimen.
The couple were freed on $10,000 bail each. Their passports were impounded.
The case will be mentioned on April 29.
Under the Sedition Act, the maximum penalty is a $5,000 fine and/or a jail term of up to three years.
The maximum penalty under the Undesirable Publication Act is a fine of up to $5,000 and/or up to 12 months.
(News indirectly through Mr Wang)
At this point, I will note that there is an interesting case of doublethink going on here, because what many religious texts say about other religions is far worse than what you can read in "The Little Bride".
I will also note that all of the claims in the tract were referenced, mostly to original source material, so does this mean the original source material is also seditious?
Also, I am quite sure that Jack Chick's anti-Catholic publications have been distributed to Catholics by many fundamentalists, but we don't see them being charged under the Sedition Act.
(In order to promote the cause of Religious Harmony in Singapore, I would have linked to a website which slams "The Little Bride" panel by panel and thoroughly debunks it and exposes its folly, but in a Kafkaesque twist, that would have been seditious in and of itself, so I guess no one will ever be able to read the tract and find out how ridiculous it is on their own terms, and will only have to rely on vague summaries from the media and court proceedings)
Christian friend: things like this make me sad to call myself christian
i'm not ashamed of my faith, merely of people who are poor proponents of it
it's like the relatives you wish you never had to admit relation to
Addendum: Some people have expressed shock that what they perceived as mere evangelism was prosecuted under the Sedition Act, but not having seen it (and being officially unable to see it, thanks to MDA's blocking of the chick.com domain) they were unaware of its offensiveness.
Unfortunately, since doing so would have been an offence under the Sedition Act itself, I was unable to fully appraise them of the piece's true offensiveness.