Dear Editor,
I refer to the column captioned ‘Human Rights: Our Collective Responsi-bility to Equality’ by Joel Simpson in the ‘In the Diaspora’ series (SN, Dec 9).
For the gay-activist communities, the death of Madiba represents another opportunity to exploit the reputation and body of an icon who has not even been buried as yet. We will surely revisit this issue in greater detail after Madiba’s funeral, but this short response to Mr Simpson will suffice for now.
The instinctive if not de facto position of the Christian community in Guyana (and I daresay South Africa and other nations) has always been that the public and policy-makers would be best served on this contentious issue by attending to fact, truth, detail and evidence.
It begins with pointing out the following online articles which Mr Simpson has obviously missed these last two days: ‘India’s Supreme Court reinstates law criminalizing gay sex’; and ‘Australian court rejects law allowing gay marriage.’
Will Stabroek News give these articles the prominence they gave to Mr Simpson?
To this end, we had addressed Sasod’s “strict child-protection policy” in the online article ‘Sasod, Molestation and Homosexuality: What are the Facts for Guyana?’ Mr Simpson has not addressed any of the issues therein, but unashamedly exploits Madiba’s legacy instead.
We had submitted a number of online articles to the Special Select Committee which we have cited several times before. The evidence in these articles remains undisputed, and provides a basis upon which all Guyanese can make an informed decision against “gay rights,” and instead urge provisions for medical/psychiatric/spiritual treatment and recovery.
It is noticeable that not one sentence in the above exercise in misinformation represented by ‘Human Rights: Our Collective Response to Equality’ speaks to the issue of treatment and recovery of/from obvious psychosexual distress, or assesses the realities of the medical/psychiatric hoax being foisted upon Guyanese as outlined in the online article by Dr Charles Socarides. Mr Simpson will not touch Dr Socarides’ document any time soon.
That, both by itself and with the avoidance of treatment and recovery issues, is tantamount to irresponsibility. And our collective responsibility is really to address such irresponsibility with every legal and democratic means at our disposal!
Yours faithfully,
Roger Williams