Politics

TAIPEI – Taiwan on Friday (Aug 12) blamed “political considerations” for the cancellation of WorldPride 2025 Taiwan after it said the organisers had insisted the word “Taiwan” be removed.

Taiwan participates in global organisations like the Olympics as “Chinese Taipei”, to avoid political problems with China which views the democratically-governed island as its own territory and bristles at anything that suggests it is a separate country.

Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung had been due to host WorldPride 2025 Taiwan, after winning the right from global LGBTQ rights group InterPride.

Last year, after an outcry in Taiwan, it dropped a reference to the island as a “region”, wording that suggests it is not a country.

But the Kaohsiung organisers said InterPride had recently “suddenly” asked them to change the name of the event to “Kaohsiung”, removing the word “Taiwan”.

“After careful evaluation, it is believed that if the event continues, it may harm the interests of Taiwan and the Taiwan gay community. Therefore, it is decided to terminate the project before signing the contract,” said the Kaohsiung organisers.

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InterPride did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said the event would have been the first WorldPride event to be held in East Asia.

“Taiwan deeply regrets that InterPride, due to political considerations, has unilaterally rejected the mutually agreed upon consensus and broken a relationship of co-operation and trust, leading to this outcome,” it said.

“Not only does the decision disrespect Taiwan’s rights and diligent efforts, it also harms Asia’s vast LGBTIQ+ community and runs counter to the progressive principles espoused by InterPride.”

Taiwan legalised same-sex marriage in 2019, in a first for Asia, and is proud of its reputation as a bastion of LGBTQ rights and liberalism.

While same sex relations are not illegal in China, same sex marriage is, and the government has been cracking down depictions of LGBTQ people in the media and of the community’s use of social media.

Late last month, a high school teacher in the Indonesian province of Yogyakarta reportedly forced a female Muslim student to wear the hijab – veils worn by Muslim women – causing her to become anxious and depressed .

As a response, the province’s government recently suspended the school’s principal and three teachers involved in the incident.

A 2021 report from Human Rights Watch shows that since 1990, there have been a growing number of national and regional laws regulating uniforms for Muslim girls and women in Indonesia’s education system.

The country’s National Commission on Violence Against Women ( Komnas Perempuan ) has also criticised these clothing standards , saying they might propagate gender bias and misogyny.

These Islamic clothing standards, however, are often seen as symbols of morality and social piety .

Islamic politics play a huge role in shaping hijab and uniform regulations in Indonesian schools, and also the social contexts that affect how these policies are implemented in the education sector.

The reality of Muslim attire in schools

To understand how Indonesia’s political climate affects hijab rules in schools, one can start by looking at the country’s 2014 ministerial regulation that govern school uniforms nationwide.

One section of the regulation states:

Muslim attires for female students are worn according to their personal beliefs and should comply with the predetermined type, model, and colour, to be used in academic activities.

A quick glance at the above phrasing shows that there seems to be no problem – female Muslim students are not compelled to wear “Muslim attire”.

Not only that, from a political perspective, the ministerial regulation was born from the government’s attempt to prevent discrimination against female Muslim students in regions such as Bali, where they are a minority.

The then education minister, Muhammad Nuh, said the law was designed to protect the religious expression of female Muslim students. It was intended to give them space to express their faith through the choice to wear, or to not wear , hijabs and other forms of Islamic attire.

However, according to reports from the National Commission on Violence Against Women and Human Rights Watch, these regulations are often interpreted differently by schools. Education institutions often see it as a lawful basis to “encourage” the use of hijabs among female Muslim students who have yet to wear them.

The ministerial regulation, for instance, says that school uniforms should “strengthen national identity”, and cultivate discipline and state obedience among students.

This spirit is what gives room for schools to establish policies and rules that conform with regional contexts – and in turn the dominant political narrative.

As regions in Indonesia increasingly see Islamic attire as symbols of morality , many schools then push female students to wear hijabs. We saw this in the recent case in Yogyakarta , and even targeted non-Muslim students such as in the 2021 incident in West Sumatra .

How did Indonesia arrive at this point?

Islamic politics in the education sector

The use of hijabs as a representation of Islamic identity in the education sector is tightly related to the revival of Islamic politics in the global, national, and local stage.

From 1965 to 1985 , the strained relation between the Indonesian New Order government and numerous Muslim groups, not to mention the state’s hostile attitude toward Islamic politics, resulted in the ban of hijabs in all public schools .

Students who wore hijabs were met with suspicion, intimidated by teachers and even the military, and were often threatened with expulsion.

The government’s hostility was in turn met with resistance – primarily from the Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI), the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council (DII), and the Islamic social organisation Muhammadiyah.

This resistance intensified after the 1979 Iranian Revolution . Iran’s decision to make the hijab compulsory for all women in the country inspired many female Indonesian Muslims.

At the time, the hijab was seen as a symbol of rebellion against the West, a social instrument to combat “moral degradation”, and a form of opposition against the domination of Western politics, economy, and culture. This symbol of being part of the global Muslim “ imagined community ” then became the foundation of the “hijabi movement” in Indonesia.

This movement then spread even further in Indonesian education, particularly universities, throughout the 1980s . This was thanks to the advocacy of a number of Islamic organisations in many campuses across Indonesia.

The presence of the Muslim Brotherhood ( Ikhwanul Muslimin ) in Indonesia , for instance, gave rise to political activism in notable campuses such as Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta; Universitas Brawijaya in Malang, East Java; Universitas Indonesia in Jakarta, and the Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB) in West Java.

The Indonesian Muslim Students (PII) also developed advocacy strategies targeted at Muslim students in numerous mosques and cities, including the Mujahidin Mosque in Bandung and the Syuhada Mosque in Yogyakarta.

Then, from 1991 to 1998, the tension between the New Order government and Muslim groups started to thaw. These massive Islamic movements succeeded in repairing political relations with the government and nationalist-secular factions.

It resulted in the Ministry of Education passing a 1991 decree that finally allowed hijabs and Muslim attire in pubic schools. Not only that, the movements also strengthened Islamic values within Indonesian society.

The use of hijabs among students in the 1990s became further widespread as the presence of Islamic clubs or organisations, known as rohis , continued to grow within schools. Wearing the hijab in this period was seen as a symbol of Muslim piety, rebirth ( hijrah ), and identity.

As the Reformation Era ushered in 1998, democratisation in Indonesia gave even more room for the rise of Islamic politics and religious expression in the public sphere.

The significance of hijabs in post-1998 Indonesia then experienced a shift. Religious anthropologist Nancy Smith-Hefner states that the hijab has grown not only to symbolise individual interpretations of Islam , but also as a lifestyle, trend, and a form of social control when interacting with the opposite gender.

A nation fractured

Two decades after the 1998 Reformation, the use of hijabs in schools and campuses is still entrenched in political debate. This reflects in the tension between conservative-fundamentalist Islamic groups, and nationalist-pluralist and mainstream Islamic groups such as Nahdlatul Ulama (NU).

The battle for how the hijab should be regulated in schools shows how social cohesion within Indonesian society continue to erode – particularly as a consequence of sharpening political polarisation after the emergence of democracy and free speech at the end of the 20th century.

The government, civil society, schools, students, parents, and Muslim groups in Indonesia must start to cultivate dialog to bridge these differences.

It is vital for Indonesia’s education sector to ensure access and opportunity for various groups within society to express their choices and interests – including students and the faculty’s decision to wear, or to not wear, the hijab.

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The writer is a PhD Researcher at KU Leuven

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Kansas voters last week became the first in the nation to weigh in on abortion access following the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

On August 2, Kansas voters resoundingly defeated a proposed amendment to the state constitution 59% to 41% that would have removed the right to an abortion and would have allowed state lawmakers to pass further restrictions in the future. The vote came as both a shock and a disappointment to pro-life leaders, who blamed misinformation spread by pro-abortion groups for the defeat of the referendum.

“Sadly, thousands and thousands of babies will die in Kansas,” president of the National Right to Life Committee Carol Tobias said in a statement released after the primary results.

The referendum, referred to as the Value Them Both Amendment, was backed by several pro-life advocacy groups including the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the nation’s oldest pro-life organization. A representative from the NRLC told Newsweek that the organization was in constant contact with its affiliates in Kansas during campaigning for the amendment, and that the group plans on continuing to be involved in campaigns before the November elections.

When asked about how the NRLC may adapt its campaign strategy for the midterms, the organization said it plans to keep a closer eye on the narrative spread by pro-choice groups.

“We are much more aware of the effect of the pro-abortion distortions and misinformation that helped the abortion industry win the Kansas referendum,” the NRLC said in a statement to Newsweek , “including the misinformation that pro-life legislation would prevent treatment of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies or measures to save a woman’s life.”

“All of those assertions by the abortion lobby are false,” the NRLC added.

Other pro-life groups, such as the Value Them Both Coalition, released a statement following the primary election as well, reiterating that “over the last six months, Kansans endured an onslaught of misinformation from radical left organizations that spent millions of out-of-state dollars to spread lies about the Value Them Both Amendment.”

“Sadly, the mainstream media propelled the left’s false narrative, contributing to the confusion that misled Kansans about the amendment,” the statement read.

The Value Them Both Amendment proposed that state representatives would be allowed to pass laws regarding abortion “including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstance of necessity to save the life of the mother.”

The NRLC told Newsweek that the organization does not support pro-life legislation that would prevent life-saving measures for the mother or treatment for ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages.

Pro-choice organizations who campaigned against the amendment, such as the Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, claimed on their campaign website that the language for the Value Them Both Amendment was purposefully confusing for voters, and that a vote in favor of the referendum would give lawmakers the chance to ban abortions without exceptions such as in cases involving rape or incest.

In a tweet following the results of the Kansas primaries, Kansas for Constitutional Freedom congratulated voters for blocking the “dangerous anti-abortion constitutional amendment.”

“This is truly a historic day for Kansas and for America,” read the tweet. “Freedom has prevailed.”

Political observers are taking the Kansas primary results as a sign that abortion may be a winning issue for Democrats in the midterm elections. Donald Trump topped Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election by 15 points in Kansas, where less than two years later a pro-life amendment was defeated by 18 points.

According to daily polling by Civiqs, an online polling company, independent voters — who make up 41% of the American electorate according to Gallup — are increasingly supporting legal abortion in all cases, jumping from 25% at the end of August 2021 to 30% as of Monday.

In Kansas, voters have also increased their support for abortion, from 21% supporting legal abortion in all cases in August 2021 to 26% as of Monday, according to Civiqs’ polls.

When asked if the Kansas primary results point toward a shift in Americans opinion on abortion across party lines, the NRLC said that striking down the referendum will result in “totally unrestricted and unlimited abortion up until birth.”

“This is not the majority opinion of Americans,” the NRLC said.

According to Civiqs, 33% of Americans support abortion in all cases as of Wednesday, the winning category out of the voters polled.

The vote against the Value Them Both Amendment did not change current state restrictions on abortion in Kansas, where the procedure is currently banned after 22 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute.