| dc.description.abstract | Based on the Grade 1-9 Curriculum Guidelines established in 2008, aiming at “eliminating sexual discrimination and upholding social pluralism,” the Ministry of Education of Taiwan had planned on distributing three teachers’ manuals for gender equity education to elementary and junior high schools in August 2011. However, believing that these gay-friendly teaching materials may confuse teenagers’ sexual identification and even induce their carnal desires, the True Love Alliance, later revealed to be a de facto Christian organization, successfully suspended the distribution through a series of high-profiled petitions to members of the Legislative Yuan and the Ministry of Education. After a series of eight public hearings, antagonism between supporters and opponents to gay-friendly materials grew even more intense, and the issue of gender equity education remains unsettled. If Christians make up only 10% of Taiwan’s population and is obviously in the minority, then how are we to understand the phenomenon that a small group of “religious extremists” (as described by the supporters of gender equity education) could mobilize the public to the extent that the implementation of a national policy was interrupted? If liberality, equality, progressivism and openness to homosexuals are said to have become core values in Taiwan, then why would the pleas of the True Love Alliance be so easily embraced by the officials and the public? This thesis will contend that the True Love Alliance‘s success cannot be simply dismissed by relegating them to religious conservatism or extremism, as the gay-friendly groups have tended to do. Instead, an examination of how the Alliance could recruit massive public support through invoking family values articulated through the subject position of “the parent” will reveal crucial aspects of the Taiwanese society where the dialectics between family and nation in the civil society of 2010s Taiwan is actively under construction. | en_US |