New York Pastor's Gay Marriage Stirs Anger Back in Malaysia

The Rev. Ouyang Wen Feng, a Chinese-Malaysian pastor who has lived in the United States since 1998, said on Tuesday that after he married his partner of roughly two years at the end of this month, the couple would travel to Malaysia for a wedding banquet, The Associated Press reported.

The move is likely to further inflame conservative officials in Malaysia, where Muslims are in the majority. Since the planned wedding in New York was announced last week, government officials and newspaper columnists have fumed that the union would harm Malaysian society.

“Day by day we see various attempts to destroy our value system and Pastor Ou is doing it in the open,” a columnist wrote in Utusan Malaysia, a conservative daily owned by the ruling party, according to a translation by the Web site the Malaysian Insider. The columnist added that Mr. Ouyang’s “attempt to break this value system to marry the same gender in this country has to be opposed. In fact the government has to act to block him.”

The country’s Islamic Affairs minister, Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom, said on Sunday that “social problems” would arise if such “extreme human rights” were permitted. “I think it will encourage liberalism in Malaysia and this understanding is worrisome,” he told reporters.

The couple plan to wed in New York on Aug. 31 — the Malaysian independence day — but a date for the banquet in Malaysia has not been announced.