Ian Boyne While the world's attention has been focused on the war in Iraq and the larger cultural war between Islam and the West, a no less intense and fierce war is taking place in the West itself between secularists and Christian conservatives and fundamentalists. The issue of homosexuality features heavily in this battle.
The struggle to place homo-sexuality on to the liberation agenda and to frame homosexuals' quest for acceptance as the latest struggle against oppression and exploitation, following blacks and women, is being stubbornly resisted by conservative Christians. The homosexual lobbyhas been making significant progress, however, which has only served to alarm the Christian conservatives who are constantly crusading for more troops to fight this Manichean war.
The recent report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights of the British House of Lords and the House of Commons titled 'Legislative Scrutiny: Sexual Orientation Regulations' represents another sign of the advance of the secularists and pro-gay rights forces. This report calls on the British Government to go as far as to prohibit private religious schools from teaching that homosexuality is sinful or morally wrong, claiming that this would constitute discrimination.
The report says, "homosexual pupils (should) not be subjected to teaching as part of the religious education or other curriculum that their sexual orientation is sinful or morally wrong." Church-run schools can be free to state what various religions teach about homosexuality, but they should, by law, be refrained from teaching that those religions' abhorrence of homosexuality is in fact objectively true.
If the school curriculum is not monitored to ensure that homosexuality is not taught as being morally wrong or sinful then that "would likely lead in practice to breaches of the pupils' rights not to be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation". Groups like the Lawyers Christian Fellowship are deeply concerned that what they see as grave infractions on free speech could well be sneaked into Jamaica through legislative circumlocution. A.J. Nicholson, of course, would never countenance any such infraction, I am sure, nor would any Jamaican politician in the near future.
Pre-historic beliefs
But it must not be seen that it is only us backward peoples in the Third World who are still clinging to pre-historic beliefs about homosexuality and insisting that these archaic, moribund and scandalous beliefs be perpetrated in private religious schools. Much like insisting that the option of Earth being still flat be taught in schools, or that the moon be taughtto consist of green cheese or that mermaids and the Tooth Fairy really exist. But we must zealously guard the right of ideological opponents freely to expound their beliefs, even when we passionately believe they are wrong.This is the essence of the democratic ideal. Let a hundred flowers bloom.
In my view, the answer to hate speech and to the propagation of absurd ideas is, as classic free speech advocates put it, "more better speech". The West is moving in some dangerous anti-democratic directions by its over-reaction to hate speech and the discrimination against minorities. On many American campuses there is repression of free expression because of the enthronement of politically correct discourse, which is the ultimate betrayal of the concept of a university.
A university should allow Klansmen, the Aryan Brotherhood, various religious cultists, Salafis and other Islamic extremists and Hindu believers in the despicable caste system to freely expound their crazy ideas. We must maintain belief not only in the marketplace of goods and service, but the marketplace of ideas. The West is becoming as intolerant, arrogant and as fundamentalist and undemocratic as the extremist Islamic societies such as Saudi Arabia and the former Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It is just that our fundamentalism is secularist and comes under the guise of intellectual sophistication and monumental learning. But its spirit is the same.
We must resist this with every fibre of our being. The drive to censor all opposition to homosexuality and to classify every objection to homosexuality as homophobia is a clever and sinister plot to stifle opposition and to gain acceptance through tyranny and intimidation. The word "homophobia" has become a conversation-stopper. It is always interesting to see how the oppressed often use the same tactics of the oppressor in their legitimation struggles.
Power of reggae, dancehall
There are some gay activists who use their money power and influence to kill the careers of our dancehall artistes,not just because they preach violence against gays - which I condemn - but because these gays want to stifle any opposition to the gay lifestyle. It is my view that even if the hardcore dancehall artistes delete all references to violence against gays in their lyrics and limit their stout opposition to gays with the quotations of biblical texts and the use of non-violent arguments against gays, the overseas fellows would still be outraged and incensed. They know the power of reggae and dancehall music and they don't want such a popular art form to be used to condemn a lifestyle which they want to see normalised and accepted as a lifestyle.
I maintain that the deejays must have the right to attack the homosexual lifestyle, even if it constitutes prejudice. The gays are free to campaign against the deejays and to urge boycott of their concerts and record-buying. They are free to use their consumer power to pressure them, but their respect for free speech should impel them to take on their prejudices ideologically rather than seek to censor.
It is impossible to have a rational discussion about homosexuality in Jamaica. The poles are too far apart. One well-known bishop is talking about whipping gays in Half-Way Tree, while being publicly silent about fornicating and adulterous pastoral colleagues. Where should they be whipped? Even university-educated Jamaicans express the most profoundly nonsensical, prejudicial and hateful statements about gay people, let alone the untutored. The issue of homo-sexuality is one clouded by emotion and prejudice and is apparently off-limits to the intellect. This is true for gay people, too.
Gays are often defensive,
Gay people are often - perhaps because of socialisation - defensive, impatient, arrogant and dismissive when faced with even a rational attempt to engage them in discourse. One wrote to me last week wondering why I, as a straight person, was taking so much interest in the subject. (No doubt implying that I have some repressed, subliminal homosexual desire). Theyresort to all sorts of psychological reductionism when faced with a serious challenge. The fact is that many can never contemplate even the possibility that their orientation could be disordered or their behaviour morally wrong. Not even the possibility. I guess they would say only the suicidal or neurotic would "deny" their very identity.
Jamaican social psychologist Christopher Charles from John Jay College in the United States has just written an interesting paper titled "The Social Representation of Homosexuality in Jamaica". He traces the historical roots of Jamaica's virulent and violent anti-homosexual culture. "The sexual intolerance of Jamaicans has its roots in the 'Christianisation" of Jamaican slavery". The buggery Law of England outlawed anal intercourse which carried the death penalty. Says Charles: "British religious law and doctrine of the 17th and 18th centuries revealed that there was a moral censure on sodomy which was wicked and sinful." I guess the British are trying to undo their excesses with their recent House of Lord House of Commons report. Charles surveys Jamaica's religious and cultural history, showing how even our literary giants like Claude McKay embraced anti-homosexual rhetoric.
Concludes Charles: "The fundamentalist Christian venom against homosexuality that started in the Church and is embraced by the Government, codified, enforced by the police, and expressed in the creative writings finds expression today in the lyrics of the secular dancehall DJs. Anti-homosexual and 'murderous' lyrics are sprouted by some of the leading dancehall DJs in their songs because they are influenced by prominent institutions of socialisation".
The Church must find a way to dissociate itself from the barbaric and uncivilised responses to homosexuals and affirm the inherent human dignity of gay people while using the best arguments to show why homosexual practice is objectively wrong. The Church must effectively unmask the propagandistic use of science to convey the view that it has been proven that homosexuality is genetic and, therefore, unavoidable. (Which is not the same as saying every homosexual chooses his orientation.)
Case studies
The most comprehensive representative study of same-sex attraction in twins done by Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner from Columbia and Yale Universities found that "less gendered socialisation" and not genetic or hormonal influences plays the dominant role in the development of same-sex attraction.
"If same-sex romantic attraction has a genetic component it is massively overwhelmed by other factors", say the scholars in an article in the American Journal of Sociology in 2002. Even the pro-homosexual scholar Edward Stein has challenged the deterministic models of homosexual development in his book The Mismeasure of Desire: the Science Theory and Ethics of Sexual orientation. See also the February/March, 2006 issue of the Scientific American Mind for the article 'Do Gays have a choice?' I challenge any homo-sexual to a debate on the genetic and scientific basis of homosexuality.
Of course, many homosexuals revert to intuitive reasoning, "hunches" and just plain experience to posit the born-as-homosexual view. Ironically, they become very "religious" in their defence of their homosexuality, citing experiential, anecdotal arguments the same way mystics cite religious experience to ground the validity of the super-natural. It does not work.
While reason is abandoned on both sides, the passions continue in the battlefield. Now one side wants to outlaw the other side's right to their ideological weapons.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
