Singaporean vlogger Amos Yee expressed outrage over Harvard College Open Campus Initiative’s abrupt cancellation of his scheduled talk that was supposed to have taken place at the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts earlier this week.
The organisers had cancelled the event, entitled ‘Jailed for Dissent,’ about 24 hours before Yee was set to give his first ever public talk.
Yee had been jubilant about the prospect of speaking at the prestigious Ivy League institution and expressed his disappointment over the cancellation of the talk in the latest vlog on his YouTube channel.
The teenager speculated that the organisers may have cancelled the talk due to his controversial views on sexual age of consent laws – Yee advocates that such laws should be eliminated.
Standing by his views on the matter, which many have taken as proof that Yee supports paedophilia, Yee asserted:
“I feel that if a person below the age of 18 perfectly consents to having sex with an adult, he should be allowed to do it. And the adult who has sex with that person should not be sent to jail for it.
“I had thoughts that I wanted to have sex with 20-year-olds when I was 16. So why shouldn’t I be able to do it? And if I did do it, it does not at all make sense that legally, the 20-year-old that my 16-year-old self had sex with should go to prison for it?”
Vehemently denying claims that those who have “misrepresented” his views on the matter spread – that Yee promotes rape and child abuse – the teenager stated that he would “never promote violence to anyone.”
Yee then griped that this was supposedly the same reason why he was banned from the Mythopoeic Society Conference (MythCon) last month, which he had been initially invited to attend.
Upset that Mythcon and Harvard college are “completely discounting all the pro-human rights work that I have done,” Yee declared:
“This really goes against the spirit of free speech that MythCon and the Harvard College Open Campus Initiative claimed that they want to cultivate.”