I’ve just gotten wind of the DBS debacle with Focus on the Family, through a Facebook group that encourages boycotting the bank for withdrawing their support for Focus on the Family Singapore as its adopted charity for the Christmas season.

Ironically, the Facebook group was set up in response to another group, which encouraged boycotting the bank for supporting the charity in the first place.

(On a personal level, the biggest irony, of course, is that I am a big fan of the latter group’s creator – poet, playwright and former schoolmate Ng Yi-Sheng.)

I just think it’s ironic that all this is happening over a Christmas promotion aimed at supporting children with learning disabilities. The issue seems to be that some DBS customers (the numbers seem to dwell between 10 and 1000) have taken offense to the choice of a charity with apparent fundamental Christian roots, since it “did not jibe with [their] beliefs”. Yi-Sheng’s Facebook group accuses the bank of supporting an “anti-gay cause”, almost as if the donations to the charity would go towards funding hate crimes rather than educating children.

Now, as a Catholic, I identify with the mission of Focus on the Family to “strengthen the institution of the family”. But in the Straits Times article, its purpose was overly simplified to being “anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality and pro-abstinence”. Unfortunately, I am fully aware that many have simplified the Catholic Church, and other fundamentalist Christian churches, to the same three labels.

I shudder to think if, two millenia ago, a young single mother was encouraged to abort her seemingly illegitimate baby, because her society did not value her claims of virginity and abstinence and wanted her to ‘save face’.

Yes, there would be no Christmas today, because Jesus would have been yanked out of Mary’s womb unceremoniously, and left bleeding, broken and dying, thirty-three years before the Cross.