A willfully vague law

Re: “Student Union calls on Prayut to scrap new ‘code of conduct’”, ( BP, Aug 18).

The Ministry of Education again shows its expected competence fully consistent with Thailand’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) ratings year after year. If you want “to prevent the problems of brawling, motorcycle racing, and drug use”, the intelligent response is to ban “brawling, motorcycle racing, and drug use”. You do not make a much broader, willfully vague law based on bad morals to infringe unjustly on a range of personal matters.

It is not the ministry’s business what sort of pictures students post online; it is certainly bad morals for any ministry to be dictating what people do in private. If they want to have consensual sex, even orgies, the Minister of Education should not be interfering in any such acts. If the orgies are non-consensual, that is a police matter properly covered by the criminal law code.

But it’s all expected: it is the rule under Thainess that whenever officials or greedy politicians talk of “good morals”, they are doing something that is bad morals. The ongoing dictatorship, which loves to lip-synch the phrase “good morals”, is the obvious example, but this latest regressive move that treats young adults as enslaved military conscripts is exactly the same. It is moral corruption deceitfully pretending to be its opposite. As such, it is a perfect example of traditional Thainess imposed by the oligarchy that likes to lord it over the peasants, who have, these past 20 years, taken to voting in informed ways that are healthily contrary to the corrupt bad old ways.

As is also the norm in Thailand, the young students protesting demonstrate a better grasp of moral right and wrong than do the ageing phu yai dictating to them. If there were any justice, the old relics would be down on their knees respectfully waiing the students who are correcting their morally corrupt prejudices. FELIX QUI