Dear Editor,
A columnist in your Monday edition persists with the illogical claim that anti-homosexuality legislation ought to be repealed here simply because it was introduced by the British.
True the British would have grafted onto pre-existing Guiana legal codes, or amended them, to extend legislation that covered not only sodomy but a whole raft of strange behaviour that had been incorporated into European criminal systems. According to Foucault these systems had been extensively updated over the nineteenth centuries as work in psychology and psychiatry revealed the extent of human deviance in the area of sexuality. So, social and cultural “evolution” imposes the continuing need to deal with emerging phenomena. Internet child pornography is an example where existing standards are invoked to deal with new methods of propagation of old disorders. But what the writer fails to underline is the fact that homosexuality and its condemnation, as we know, has nothing at all to do with British hegemonic imperialism. It is mentioned with judgemental bias in scriptures that long pre-date European colonialism. It is embedded in Christianity, the faith the British brought with them. It then follows that Christianity, a colonial imposition many slaves and ex slaves fought to acquire and practice, ought to be banned for the reason that it transports in its scriptures the very prescriptions and prohibitions the writer intends us to defy.
One historical source I no longer recall mentions Guyanese pork-knockers going into the bush with their little “catamites” (feminised boy children) to secure for themselves sexual relief in the jungle. May or may not have been true in rare cases, but in an atmosphere where information like that is passed around, the need for dissuasive legislation becomes evident.
The column “In the diaspora” to which I refer, is normally refreshingly progressive in its perspectives and is notable for its compassion with regards to the poor and powerless. But its current husbandry of the pro-homosexuality agenda is a case of taking a sort of “liberalism” too far. The non sequiturs and logical fallacies carted around the column on this neo-colonial liberalism are too numerous to note. But principal among them is the appeal to authority we find in the reference to “scientists” and “friends” who have assured the author that perversion is all right. Or the invocation of Bishop Tutu without once mentioning the fact that last year Anglican bishops from Africa almost caused a new schism in the church when the British, now pulling us in the other direction, approved the consecration of a homosexual priest. The Africans would have none of it. The argument for a return to ancient paganisms that tolerated homosexuality is part of a dialogue that extends back to ancient Greek times when the condemnation of the pederasts and their catamites was recorded.
The fact that gazes unblinkingly at us is that there are only two sexes. This duality is determinable by tests of the sort they do at the Olympics. Homosexuality is nothing more than the counter-natural mimicry of one or the other. Nothing more. It is therefore not a problem of physiology or genetics at all. It is behaviour. In its discussion we have not only to contend with science, but with theology and precisely eschatology and divine judgement. What can God say to us to explain the contradiction in which a man created to sin in this way is then punished for it? Discussion of this subject also enters the realm of the philosophy of right and wrong. Enters the area of the psychology of development…It is a subject that a legal opinion, being sought of the courts, will have to consider in its many dimensions.
The Creator who put the systems in place and is all-knowing has set his limits. We cannot infringe the laws with the weak self-indulgent justifications that are splattered over the columns supporting this disorder.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
