Petition Against Homophobic Japanese MP Reaches 25,000

A petition demanding an apology from Japanese MP, Mio Sugita, has reached more than 25,000 people.

Mio Sugita, an MP from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has come under for a extremely anti-LGBT 2015 television interview. The interview was recently brought to attention after a magazine published an opinion piece from her in which she doubled down on her homophobic beliefs.

In the interview, she said accepting LGBT+ people would lead to “an increase in unhappy people” and that most gay people were simply going through a phase. “Adolescent children sometimes have strange feelings. I grew up in a girl’s high school, so there were only female people around me,” she said on the television show ‘From the Country of the Rising Sun’.

Sugita has since said gay people don’t deserve welfare because they are not productive members of society – because they cannot have children. Her comments have also angered the disabled community, who took offence at her belief that those who can’t have children are not productive.

“I cannot have children because of the effects of medication. But I don’t believe that human value is decided by the fact of whether one can have children or not,” one of the disabled protesters, Hiroko Uchiyama, told Kyodo News.

More than 5,000 people gathered outside LDP headquarters in Tokyo, calling for her resignation last month.

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