THE EDITOR, Sir:TWO OF your veteran columnists, Ian Boyne and Martin Henry, have written two excellent scholarly articles on the subject of homosexuality appearing in the Sunday, November 28 and Thursday, December 2 editions of The Gleaner.
Ian Boyne appealed to the moral conscience of the Jamaican people for a compassionate attitude towards homosexuals, while pointing to the fact that homosexuality is an immoral act. His call for greater intellectual discourse by those debating the issue in the media, given the complex issues involved, was particularly brilliant given the important role the issue is having on public opinion.
Most importantly, he attempted to separate the issue of homosexuality from the social ill of HIV/AIDS epidemic now affecting the nation, two separate issues that need to be kept in proper perspectives; the one an immoral issue and the other a consequence of our immoral age. Martin Henry's article provides an excellent philosophical discourse on the debate and while, like Ian Boyne's, it engages the reader intellectually it falls short in that it tends too much towards pessimism. Mr. Henry's suggestion that the nation will ultimately bow to European human rights/gay lobbyist groups, and to modify our laws and our way of life in support of homosexuality, has gone too far.
IMPORTANT REASON
There is one very important reason why Mr. Henry's assumption could be wrong: differences in cultural experience. Our cultural experience differs greatly from the much more liberal secular humanistic European societies he mentioned in his article, albeit their economic influence on our struggling dependent Third World nation. Our people are far too homophobic based on our religious heritage and no Government or political party in Jamaica is going to run the risk of moving the nation in such a direction.
LESSON
Those who disagree may consider one important lesson from the 2004 presidential election in the United States where the unpopular wartime President George W. Bush was returned to power in a landslide victory with the support of a significant percentage of Catholic and conservative evangelical vote over Democratic contender John Kerry, viewed by many as a left wing liberal, who supports abortion rights, liberal stem cell research and whose vote against a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage in the U.S. Senate helped defeat a Bill supported by most Americans.
Despite our moral decline, our nation is still largely conservative in its religious conviction and is expected to remain that way. All the recent scholarly research on the subject by both conservative Catholic and Protestant theologians on the subject of homosexuality that I have examined tends to point to the practice of homosexuality as a sin and lean in the direction of supporting the kind of compassionate attitude pointed to by Mr. Boyne. While the church in Jamaica may be likely to becoming more compassionate in its dealing with homosexuals it is not likely to change its stance on the practice of homosexuality.
I am etc.
REV. NEWTON GABBIDON
IPMIorg@aol.com
Brooklyn, New York
