By Byron Buckley, News EditorTHE CALL last week by the international organisation, Human Rights Watch, for the Jamaican Government to repeal the law against buggery in order to prevent the police and other persons from abusing homosexuals is based on flawed reasoning.
Based on this logic, Government should abolish the laws against rape and any other offence in an effort to prevent people from committing them. Human Rights Watch, supported by local human rights advocates like Opposition Spokesman on Justice Delroy Chuck, is seeking to establish a causative relationship where none exists.
BUGGERY LAW
Mr. Chuck, a lawyer, knows very well that if Parliament repeals the buggery law tomorrow, people would continue to express hostility towards homosexuals and, to a lesser extent, HIV/AIDS patients because the reaction to these groups is based on values and belief systems NOT on legal systems.
The local human rights advocates who are parroting the views of their international counterpart should, for example, be familiar with the vigilante killing of praedial thieves in rural Jamaica, despite the fact that it is a crime to do so. In fact, on many occasions the police risk their lives trying to rescue victims of vigilante justice.
HIGH LEVEL OF VIOLENCE
Local and international human rights groups are on safer grounds when they advocate for members of the society to be more humane to each other, no matter the differences. As the Human Rights Watch report, launched in Kingston last week noted, there is a high level of violence within the Jamaican society. But having made this observation about a general phenomenon, the group then leaps to the conclusion that a specific group homosexuals are receiving an indiscriminate amount of violence. Why single out homosexuals and try to make a tenuous link between them and persons with HIV/AIDS?
In the midst of the raging debate sparked by Human Rights Watch's call for the buggery laws to go, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) hosted a function which highlighted abuses which children in Jamaica suffer. Minister of Education Youth and Culture, Maxine Henry-Wilson, told the gathering that "one out of every five girls between the ages of 15 and 19 is the victim of forced sex, overwhelmingly perpetrated by someone with whom she has a close relationship."
The abuse of these girls occurs very often in private bedrooms/homes where Mr. Chuck argued last week that the law should not poke around. "...I believe it (homosexuality) is a moral issue and not one that should be prohibited by the legislature," Mr. Chuck told The Gleaner.
HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES
If Mr. Chuck and other human rights advocates maintain that the law must not interfere in private sexual behaviour, then it is not only the buggery law that must go. So should laws against incest, rape/carnal abuse and paedophilia (sex between adults and minors). After all, people have all kinds of bedroom preferences and taste!
If the law has no place in the bedroom, why is adultery still the basis for divorce and why are men and women not allowed to simultaneously have several marriage partners?
Yes, Mr. Chuck morality is still legislated! Where do you draw the line?
Byron Buckley is a news editor at the Gleaner.
