According to Susan Loone's article 'Craftily crafting statutes misquotes' (May 17), in spite of anti-PAS supporters' and BN politicians' continued quoting or misquoting PAS's leaders out of context, PAS continued making political inroads into the non-Muslim community.

Part of the reasons were attributable to non-Muslims' cultural and religious practices being respected; lands allocated for pig farming; strictures against vices like gambling and alcohol consumption winning support of conservative non-Muslims and, in the case of sexily-clad women wrestlers and a Japanese serial romanticising adultery, even feminists.

Most significantly, the writer pointed out that PAS had pledged to amend the Federal Constitution to make Islamic laws supreme if the party formed the federal government. "Any other law - common, civil and criminal - which is deemed to be inconsistent with Islamic principles would be modified and reconciled".

Such news according to the writer might be "good news", particularly to those who wanted to see civil and political rights restored including the abolishment of the Internal Security Act (ISA).

This is the crux of the issue: Will PAS' Islamisation of the administration restore or enhance civil and political rights? Will the repeal of the ISA, whilst restoring one aspect of civil and political right against arbitrary detention, be at the expense of sacrificing a whole range of other civil and political rights implicated by the government being changed to a theocratic one? Is it really "good news"?

This very much depends on how one construes the meaning of "civil and political rights". It also depends on whose civil and political rights, we are talking about.

PAS views the world - and governance - in morally absolute and unambiguous terms. Its proposed dominant control of all governmental institutions represents the best hope to getting rid of the rot perceived to have permeated therein.

Our society however is a mosaic of different races, religions and cultures. In such a pluralistic society, moral relativism is preferred to moral absoluteness. This is because theocracy visualises a society, morally sanctified, and set apart for the glory of the Almighty. This is not a problem for the devout people amongst the religious majority. But about the minorities who are either less religious, if not downright secular or atheistic, or those that practise different faiths?

As government and laws impinge intimately and intrude on the daily lives of citizenry, it is vital for the protection of the political and civil rights of cultural, religious and secular minorities that the State's administration be separated from religion and is not theocratic.

(The present PAS' leadership may be moderate and righteous but once the theocratic system is established and entrenched, there is no saying that the next batch of leaders may not be religious extremists imposing their beliefs and way of life through laws on everyone else).

By all means, the State can promote religion and encourage religious values that the Barisan Nasional has so far been doing since independence as provided for under the Federal Constitution. The State does this with the assistance of the family and various religious and educational institutions established.

However, the State and the laws themselves are for most parts kept separate from religion. Neither our constitutional document nor the so-called 'social contract' between the different races at the time of independence contemplates the creation of a theocratic administration based on Islamic laws.

If a theocracy was to be established, there is no need for representative parliamentary system. Parliamentary system of democracy is a government of the people and for the people whereas strictly a religious theocratic system of government is of the Almighty and for the Almighty.

Indeed, our diversity has always been our strength. The progress of modern Malaysia today is in a large part due to a healthy interplay of different ideas and values amongst her people, which is only possible to flourish and continue outside a monotheistic and theocratic framework.

It is hard to understand how a democracy manifested by tolerance or even encouragement of diversity can be synonymous with a theocracy sought to be established by PAS.

It is ironic, this suggestion by the writer, that PAS be supported to repeal the ISA for the restoration of civil and political rights of which - especially in respect to religious minorities - theocracy, by definition, overrides!

Some religious theocracies proceed on the logic that a government (or its leaders) which do not claim to be in submission to the God of the Holy Book by the fusion of government with religion teach(es) all of its citizens that God need not be obeyed; a government which does not claim to be based on the Holy Book is claiming that the Holy Book itself can be ignored.

This absolutist logic is fallacious. In not proceeding with theocracy, it does not necessarily mean that the government or some of its leaders do not believe in God or the Holy Book. It means that they equally respect the democratic rights of religious minorities as enshrined in the constitutional document.

(In the United States, though Christianity is the dominant religion, widely practised, the 'wall of separation' between the Church and the State is also maintained by her laws. The Americans appear to share what their philosopher Ben Franklin wisely counseled when he said: "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its professors are obligated to call for the help of civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of it being a bad one.")

It is also ironic the writer's suggestion that PAS' morally sanitised policy against the present government's comparatively more liberal policies in respect of media romanticising adultery or depicting scantily-clad women was one that could find support amongst feminists.

The writer seemed to have forgotten it was only not too long ago that PAS spiritual adviser suggested scantily-dressed women were the cause of rape and social crimes!

Is PAS' rationale behind separate queues for males and females consistent with the feminists' position? It is hard to understand how a theocracy upholding male patriarchy can ideologically be compatible with modern feminism.

Summarising, at any given time in a society where it becomes difficult to distinguish good from evil, truth from falsehood (that is, a state of moral anarchy), the emotional appeal of a theocracy structured on moral absolutism naturally becomes strong. It then becomes easy to forget that moral absolutism of one (majority) religious sect automatically marginalises the free expression of those of other minority sects - that true democracy involves a continuous interplay of diverse ideas.

Is the revulsion against the ISA, alleged abuse of power and crony corporate bailouts (what I would describe as secondary issues in the sense that, no matter how hard, they can be rectified by change of politicians or policies) so great that Malaysians are prepared for a paradigm shift from separation of religion from government to that of fusion of religion with government (what I would call the principal issue)?

Is the pursuit of civil and political democratic rights to be carried out with such urgency and determination to an extent that a religious theocracy is acceptable to supersede the present unsatisfactory regime even if that theocracy implies a submission of all these civil and political rights to the calls of the higher divine authority?

Separation of religion from government or a theocratic government? This is the principal decision confronting all Malaysians.