J'cans should guard liberties
published: Wednesday | August 6, 2003

THE EDITOR, Sir:

AS MUCH as America's subliminal belief that non-Americans are something less than human revolts me, I admire and applaud their respect for their own people. Is there any nation other than America that respects individual liberty? I ask this because Jamaica sorely needs an example of how the individual citizen should be treated, and we have seen, and are probably following, America's example of how to treat non-Americans.

The concept of individual liberty is virtually unknown in Jamaica. This is obvious to anyone who knows of the arbitrary abuse of police power in the summary execution of suspects and in the invasion of people's homes. However, the extent to which the concept is unknown becomes staggeringly clear when one looks at the proposals put to the House in the last week of July 2003. Is there any democracy in the world that would consider the thought of a mandatory sterilisation programme? I can think of only two nations with such programmes: Germany between 1933 and 1945, as a means of reducing the population of 'undesirables' within Germany, and the People's Republic of China, whose subjects have about as much individual liberty as the Central African Republic has naval power.

As for mandatory gynaecological tests for all girls in the school system, this seems to give a whole new meaning to the term 'invasion of privacy', or would that be 'invasion of 'privates'? I know that a record of vaccination is required by schools in order to enrol children, but this is required to stop epidemics of deadly contagious diseases. Is loss of virginity a deadly contagious disease? I suppose schoolboys can transmit it to schoolgirls, but schoolboys are not being tested, and I do not think there is a test applicable to boys anyway.

Might I suggest that the money that would be used to institute these totalitarian exercises be spent conveying the Bellevue asylum into a properly functioning mental hospital? Judging by the representatives of the people of Jamaica, it is clear that we are in urgent need of one.

I am, etc.,

ALLAN J.D. FOREMAN

Elizabeth Avenue

St. Andrew

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