Martin Henry, Contributor
OVER THE last few weeks, there has been a robust outpouring of opposition to homosexuality in this, one of the most anti-homosexual patches of the planet. Much of this outpouring has been triggered off by that designing Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.
Christian lawyer Shirley Richards has written a magnificent piece on "Law, privacy and human rights", and The Sunday Gleaner (November 28) carried it as its prestigious Public Affairs column on the editorial page.
Do opposers of homosexual practice really think that their protests and declarations and moral profiling will keep Jamaica a haven for the legal opposition of homosexuality? Or are they conscious that they are making their last stand in a rearguard action that is doomed to fail?
THE STATE WILL BOW
One by one, the DJs are bowing on the international scene. The Gleaner, a metaphor for media, will in due course be forced to bow. The Jamaican state, too, will bow. Within five years, the laws of this country will be forced to legitimate, at least to some extent, homosexual practice.
How did we come to this? It has been a long road to defeat or victory. Victory or defeat depending on which side of the issue one is on.
The evangelical applied philosopher and theologian, Francis Schaeffer, in his many books has done a particularly good and clear job of tracing out how we have come, over the long haul, to be where we are. In the film and book How Should We Then Live? Schaeffer said, "To understand where we are in today's world in our intellectual ideas and in our cultural and political lives - we must trace three lines in history, the philosophic, the scientific and the religious."
Schaeffer traced the rise to dominance of secular humanism, materialism, existentialism and moral relativism in Western thought and then general culture. These are not just big word labels. They are big ideas; and ideas have consequences. In Death in the City, Schaeffer applied Jeremiah's times just before the Babylonian captivity and that explicitly anti-homosexual passage in Romans one to our situation in the modern world.
He boldly proclaimed that the post-Christian world of our generation is under the wrath of God. The streams of ideas identified by Schaeffer have swept away a sovereign God, the Imposer of moral absolutes, and replaced Him with the sovereign I in a world without absolutes.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, who has been described as perhaps the most important influence on modern thought, preached the doctrine of autonomous freedom and used his freedom to put all five of his children by a mistress in an orphanage.
Friedrich Nietzche saw clearly that if there is no God, then everything is permissible. He went mad. Darwin's philosophy of biological evolution eliminated or at least seriously weakened the presence and role of God. And the aping social sciences picked up the fad.
The three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with their transcendent, all-powerful God of moral absolutes have been the biggest obstacles to humanist thought. But when 'enlightened' Christian theologians themselves tore down pillars of faith, they helped to unleash the tide of humanist ideas which is sweeping away moral absolutes. Shirley Richards wrote that 'human rights tradition has, since the Second World War, become the first world religion, albeit without God, church or rituals."
LITTLE CHOICE
Caught between sanctions of various sorts and commitment to human rights Jamaica will have little choice but to bow.
When the American revolutionaries declared the 'self-evident' truth of 'unalienable Rights', they said these rights were endowments from the Creator of men. The French revolutionaries had no such grounding for 'The Rights of Man and the Citizen'. They chose humanism as their base, and The Reign of Terror quickly followed.
The United Nations has chosen the same humanist base for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the proposed Jamaican Charter of Rights has been careful not to appear to be grounded in faith, despite the sublime covenant prayer of the National Anthem.
The principal vehicles for spreading ideas academia and media have been captured and have long been controlled by secular humanist ideas. The real war has been over for a while. And opponents of those ruling ideas are either stupid and stubborn or are courageously making a principled last stand.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
