Annie Kitchin | Church has no patent on marriage

Thank goodness for Ethon Lowe, bringing the fresh gusts of his lucid thinking, humanity and generosity to blow away the putrid miasma of the homophobic lynch mob, of which – sadly – Peter Espeut is one of the representatives.

I met Peter almost 50 years ago, and even at that time, it was clear to me that he held so fast to his religious indoctrination, he so absolutely refused to open his mind to any possibility that what he had been taught about the world from the perspective of his church was oppressive, inhumane, and just plain WRONG, that I was quite shocked.

However, I fully expected that, as he grew older, as he accumulated experience, he would learn to use his own judgement, test the teachings he had grown up with against his own observations, perceptions and understanding, and become less fearful, less reactionary.

Alas, I have to concede that this has not happened, and that Deacon Espeut has doubled down on the ignorance and malevolence inculcated into him as a child.

Take the assumption that marriage is a religious rite, invented by the Church. It most decidedly is NOT! Although the Church has arrogated to itself the right to say who can marry whom and when, and had drawn up a whole list of ridiculous conditions associated with marriage (chief of which was that marriage was for LIFE, no matter if your spouse beat you, became a lunatic confined to an asylum, or drank/gambled away your earnings), it was NEVER originally a religious phenomenon, but a purely social one, to enable property to be held within a family and passed on to offspring.

CHURCH APPROPRIATED INSTITUTION

A couple would stand up before the community and declare that they would henceforth be living together as a couple, and that any child borne by the woman should be known by all to be the child of the man also. Celebratory rituals were added, since this was, after all, a joyful announcement. But it was only much later that the Church appropriated the institution, even refusing to acknowledge any other form of marriage but that laid down by itself.

Fast-forward to more recent times and the reintroduction of the concept of civil marriage after the French Revolution. In most of Europe, only civil marriage is legal, and a religious ceremony is a matter of personal taste and preference, held AFTER the civil marriage has taken place.

Even in countries such as the United Kingdom and its erstwhile colonies such as Jamaica, where church marriages are legal, this is only because churches have been granted the facility of legalising the procedure (by the signing of the register by the couple in the vestry).

I am, therefore, somewhat bemused at all these church people trying to impose their views on marriage on the population as a whole. If you, as a religious person, don’t want to marry somehow of your own sex (even if you are actually gay), nobody is forcing you to do so. But why do you think you should get away with dictating to other people from your own narrow, bigoted perspective?

Moreover, although you won’t often hear this, because people are literally afraid of speaking out to disagree with the oppressive, backward tendencies of religion in this country, more and more Jamaicans think it’s about time the Church made an effort to catch up with, say, the 19th century. Although the newspapers and radio stations seek to hide this fact (perhaps they are afraid of acknowledging it themselves), fewer and fewer people have time for the fundamentalist religious attitudes that are still mainstream in this country.

It is time that the media opened up to a frank discussion, unmediated by censorship (which is unfortunately rife here) – if they do, I think a lot of people will be in for a shock.

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