Ian Boyne, Contributor
IT IS nigh impossible to have a serious, reasoned and informed discussion on homosexuality in Jamaica. The degree of prejudice, blind rage, ignorance, intellectual dishonesty and muddled thinking which surround the issue is appalling.
It is not just the screaming, fire-and-brimstone opponents of homosexuality who are guilty of crooked thinking. I find that the homosexuals, even those in the intelligentsia, are very woolly in their thinking, and their arguments justifying homosexuality are pitifully weak.
Perhaps it might be due to the persecution which homosexuals suffer and the immense prejudice and bigotry which they face, but I find many of them to be exceedingly arrogant, petulant and sloppy in their discourse on homosexuality.
Homosexuals almost never attempt to get past positing the sovereignty of their feelings and desires in seeking to justify their sexual behaviour. Their philosophical credo seems to be, "I desire, therefore I am".
They continue to push the unverified myth that there is some homosexual gene which makes people gay, and they have even succeeded in getting many straight people to start echoing the view that people are born homosexuals. The scientific data do not support that. I challenge anyone to bring ineluctable scientific evidence to contest my view. I heard even the staunch anti-gay President George Bush say in an interview that gay people are born that way. Major propaganda victory for the gays.
ANTI-RELIGIOUS GAYS
The anti-religious gay people who seek every opportunity to disparage the Bible and ridicule religious people must explain, in the absence of any transcendent moral order, what makes their sexual behaviour ethical? How do we decide, if God does not exist or if there is no means of divine revelation, what is right and wrong? If you are a philosophical naturalist, how do you decide ethical issues? The common ways are by an appeal to culture, custom or community.
Something is right because humans, through a process of trial and error, adopt a utilitarian approach in coming to determine right and wrong.
So if the majority of people in cultures and civilisations throughout history have accepted heterosexuality as the norm and despised homosexuality, on what basis do homosexuals assert the right to practise a sociologically abnormal lifestyle and deem it ethical?
There is no issue up for discussion in Jamaica which requires more moral courage, level-headedness and intellectual honesty than that of homo-sexuality. This is a subject which makes otherwise rational, sane and even-handed people fly into a blind, senseless rage.
When I told a journalistic colleague that I was going to deal with the subject of homosexuality in my column, and that I would be taking my usually balanced, fair-minded and intellectually dispassionate stand, he shouted at me, "Ian, mind me and you fall out, you know!"
I asked him, sure that I would elicit agreement:
RIGHT TO EMPLOYMENT
"So you would agree that homosexuals have a right to employment, though? You would not be opposed to standing up for the right of homosexuals to jobs and housing?" His answer was fast and furious:
"No, Ian, man, dem nuh fi get any job. Dem must stay away from decent people. God condemn dem. Dem nasty. They are abomination."
I was stunned. This is a senior journalist. "So you mean you would support their firing?"
"Yes, Ian, dem must not get any jobs. Dem evil, dem nasty. Dem must keep away from society until dem change."
I asked whether it was okay for them to be chased out of their homes.
LIGHTNING FALL ON DEM
"Yes, I don't want to live near any of them. When God ready to mek lightning fall on dem, I don't want to be near. I don't want to be near anybody who is a homosexual. I don't want to work with dem; I don't want to live near to dem. Dem fi dead!"
He was shouting and ranting like a Pentecostal preacher in his elements. And this is a non-church-going, gambling friend of mine who lives with his woman in concubinage. He is not religious but he finds religious language convenient in expressing the common, garden-variety aversion and resentment, not just of homosexuality but of homosexuals. With this kind of dehumanisation, it is not hard to take seriously the charges of Human Rights Watch in its sobering report issued recently titled, Hated to Death.
The media and the society have not given the kind of reflective analysis that this report deserves.
In fact, I can probably bet that no Jamaican journalist who has not worked on this story has even read the report. All the attention has been focused on the recommendation that we decriminalise homosexuality.
We can reject that recommendation without rejecting the gravamen of Human Rights Watch's concern which is about the inhumane treatment some homosexuals endure in Jamaica. Why suddenly so many of us are pretending that as a society we treat homosexuals in a just way and that they suffer no harm due to harassment and outright persecution? (It is, of course, the poor working class ones who suffer. We dare not disrespect Mr. Big Man homosexual who is our employer, facilitator and benefactor!)
The Human Rights Watch report is available on the organisation's website. Members of the civil society groups ought to have the guts if it requires that to read the full report rather than listen to what the critics are saying about it.
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
The report has a number of anecdotes and features interviews with gays who claim persecution. The point is not whether the experiences of the gays interviewed are commonplace. We should be so horrified at the human rights violations of just one person that we should seek to ensure it does not happen, rather than say, in effect, if the situation does not amount to genocide then we are justified in leaving it alone.
"When people in Jamaica are driven from their homes and towns, subjected to relentless violence with little recourse to police protection, discriminated against in health care provision and face public disclosure of confidential and private information because they are living with HIV/AIDS or based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, they are not experiencing 'Jamaican culture'. They are experiencing human rights violations," says Human Rights Watch. I completely agree.
And the facile view that "foreigners" have no right to "interfere" in our "internal affairs" is so intellectually abhorrent in this age of globalisation as not to warrant any serious rejoinder. It is a convenient propaganda ploy, which plays well to the gallery but which manifests moral cowardice.
Human Rights Watch cogently points to a range of international conventions to which Jamaica is signatory which upholds rights which gays complain are frequently and casually violated in Jamaica.
Invoking the Westphalian sovereignty doctrine to insulate Jamaica from the scrutiny of the international community is akin to saying that the international community was right to see 500,000 Rwandans killed or the ethnic Albanians eliminated without a whisper from the world.
No, there are certain universal human rights which are impervious to any kind of cultural resistance. Show me why Human Rights Watch's recommendations are flawed and knock them philosophically or empirically, but don't tell me, as some letter writers and commentators have been saying, that they have no right to interfere in our business, and "why those white people don't leave us alone."
NO RIGHT TO FREE ASSEMBLY
If people have to run from their homes and communities because they are homosexuals; if they have no right to free assembly; if they are denied medical assistance because of their sexual orientation; if when assaulted they cannot call on the state security forces to protect them and to arrest the assailants; if they are physically abused by the security forces just because they are gay; if they are harassed on the streets simply because of how they walk and talk, and if they are denied employment because of their sexual orientation, this is a denial of human rights and Jamaica would be in violation of a host of human rights conventions which it has solemnly sworn to uphold. And the Jamaican state has a responsibility to carefully investigate the charges to ensure that they are true in no instance.
CHURCH MUST BAWL OUT
And people who are not homosexuals primarily those of us who are in the media and the church must be the first to bawl out on this matter. It should not take foreigners to come here to scream about things that we as the watchdog of the nation should be alerting the nation to as a matter of course. We, too, will be labelled closet homosexuals but we have to take that risk in the interest of justice and human rights. Journalism calls for courage and leadership.
As a member of a conservative Christian tradition, I believe there is absolutely no way to justify the practice of homosexuality from the pages of the Bible. I am firmly, absolutely convinced that there is no way to harmonise Scripture with homosexual practice. The Bible condemns homosexuality as sinful and states unequivocally that God not man will bring judgment on homosexuals. Anyone who doubts this must read the first-class scholarly exegetical and hermeneutical book by Professor Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice.
Those of us who for religious reasons oppose homosexual practice must find a way to defend the human rights of homosexuals for employment, housing, health care, security (within the law), and non-harassment while stoutly maintaining our stand against the practice. There is, of course, a homosexual agenda and, yes, the embattled gays are marshalling their forces to restrict free speech.
Many homosexuals want more than just tolerance and respect. They want acceptance of their lifestyle and they are so arrogant, militant and opinionated that they believe that any criticism of their lifestyle, any failure to accept it as just a normal variant and an "alternative lifestyle" is itself condescending, bigoted and backward.
INTELLECTUALLY INTIMIDATED
We who are heterosexuals must not be intellectually intimidated by the bully tactics of the gays, to the point where we react in the same unreasoning, emotional and xenophobic way. Groups like Outrage and the others attacking our deejays not only want dancehall lyrics to delete the violence. They don't want the deejays to sing against homosexuality per see. The dancehall artistes have every right to use popular culture to oppose and attack homosexuality. That is free speech.
I am convinced that the gay lobby is threatening free speech and that its insecurities won't make homosexuals rest easy until their practice is accepted as normal. Our Judeo-Christian civilisation says it is not, and I completely reject homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.
Bible-bashing homosexuals will have to tell us why if their practice is condemned by all civilisations and cultures and is not a pattern in nature; why if the majority population finds it abhorrent and abominable, do they have the moral authority to assert their right to acceptance? On what epistemological principle?
The arrogant Bible-bashers should be challenged to a serious intellectual exchange. I am ready. I will not back down (no pun intended).
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your emails to anboyne1@yahoo.com or infocus@gleanerjm.com
