Martin HenryIT IS now a month and a day since that controversial nude wedding on Valentine's Day at a Jamaican hotel devoted to hedonism in name and practice. And contributions to charity can purchase absolution. And another carnival season is upon us, this year with a difference a proposed code of conduct for regulating the bumping and grinding.
Byron Lee, one of the biggest names behind the Jamaica Carnival, is in support of a code of conduct to dignify the sexually-rich bacchanal. "We have had to stop young people who come in and think that this is what carnival is about," Mr. Lee complains. "They think it is just the wining up and the grinding and the bumping. We have people walking around to tell them that it is not acceptable."
That is going to be a long, futile walk. The grinders and bumpers are right about carnival, and Byron "Tiny Winy" Lee, playing to the gallery of residual moral opinion, is both wrong and deceptive. Father Ho Lung's concept of the "clean" carnival is not on. From ancient times the spring carnival has been a Bacchanalia. Bacchus was the god of wine and revelry. The language, costumes, conduct and purpose of the Bacchanalia have survived, despite the strenuous and misguided efforts of the Church to baptise the festival as Easter.
It is churchmen, The Gleaner tells us, who are "calling for a code of conduct to curb the sexy gyrations of carnival revellers this year," having lost the battle to curb the resurgence of the Bacchanalia at Easter. The Bacchanalia takes pride of place being older, more widespread and a livelier diversion from the daily grind of existence. As Henry David Thoreau once remarked "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Carnival, Dance Hall, etc. are opportunities to "bruk out" and "leggo" like "leggo beasts". Then the Spring Breakers are again here a few more tourist dollars, a few more pointless (?) complaints, a few more tranquillisers to get some sleep.
The JHTA has "issued a stern warning to spring breakers to tone down their lewd and obscene behaviour" at the number five destination in the world for accommodating the young "bruk out" Americans. But dear JHTA (and Minister of Tourism) how will we hold our number 5 spot (for some a boon, for others a badge of shame and disgrace) if we cut out the lewdness and obscene behaviour? What do you think has brought here the young human animals brimming over with hormones which run things? Have we not said in our invitation and hosting: drop your home and college scruples like your garments and come to paradise for the "bruk out" of your life? "Man free."
But even quite young children quickly learn that there are consequences to human choices. And the unintended consequences are the biggest ones. Bruk out precedes bruk down. Any discussion of conduct nowadays very rapidly becomes a discussion of personal freedom and human rights. Freedom and rights have become the supreme goods. But is there anyone so foolish as to believe that there can be freedom and rights without boundaries? And if there are to be boundaries, from whence will these boundaries come and where will they be placed? Who is to supervise these boundaries, and why should anybody respect them?
Nothing measures the social health of a society better than attitudes to human sexuality, family, marriage and home. All across the so-called Western world and its sphere of influence, which is virtually everywhere, there is a dramatic ground-swell of change in attitude about these cornerstone issues in society. We would be asses of the first degree to believe that huge unintended social consequence will not follow a fundamental shift of moral perspectives.
A mass nude wedding, for instance, is not just a private and personal matter among participants as so much of the lop-sided and hypocritical outpourings in support of the Hedonism III event has sought to make out. Marriage is a public, social, legal and, in a very deep sense, a religio-spiritual contract. The laws of every civilised state regulates marriage, removing it from the purely private and personal domain. Sexual behaviour is not a matter purely of private and personal "preferences" and "alternative lifestyles" as the homosexual movement here and everywhere is trying to make out. If the ideal of monogamous heterosexual relationship and the moral code which supports it as a foundation of the social order is abandoned, where do we reasonably stop? After the battles for the legitimisation of homosexuality are finally won as they will be here as in more "advanced" countries what is to stop us moving on to paedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, harems of women and eunuchs, temple-sacred prostitution, and the whole works?
The cultures in which the Bacchanalia flourished in ancient times had all of these features and more. Hedonism was the name of the game. We have surreptitiously added sex as a fourth S to the three Ss of sand, sea and sun for tourism. Promoters are now advising that there is a huge market out there for the homosexual tourists. Why are we shunning the paedophiles? There are very many more of them.
How many men have not fantasised about sex with fresh, pubescent girls? These men are making their way to South-East Asia. And at least one of our Central American neighbours has found that loopholes in their sex laws were pulling in paedophiles. On what grounds should children be exempt from sex in this enlightened age of contraceptives and personal choice? Doesn't an age of consent law (itself an obscenity) deny younger people their human rights? Already children are furiously doing it. The average age of initiation here is 13 for boys, 14 for girls and dropping. The age of consent, as outdated as sodomy laws and indecent exposure laws, is 16. When we have finally exhausted ourselves in all-inclusive hedonism and the debt of consequences start pouring in, we will seek a bail-out by willingly placing ours necks in a yoke of bondage. Social breakdown invites tyranny.
I have in the past quoted S.H. Kellogg's exegesis on the "Book of Leviticus." I shall do so again today in closing: "Marriage and the family are not merely civil arrangements, but divine institutions; so that God has not left it to the caprice of a majority to settle what shall be lawful in these matters." God has declared not merely the material well-being of man, but holiness, as the moral end of Government and of life. 'The nation that will not serve Him shall perish.' All this is not theology, merely, or ethics, but history. All history witnesses that moral corruption and relaxed legislation, especially in matters affecting the relations of the sexes, brings in their train sure retribution, not in Hades, but here on earth.
"Our modern democracies would do well to pause in their progressive repudiation of the law of God in many social questions For, despite the unbelief of multitudes, the Holy One still governs the world, and it is certain that He will never abdicate His throne of righteousness to submit any of His laws to the sanction of a popular vote."
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
