Dear Editor,
Were we to submit to the logic of Lincoln Lewis and Vidya Kissoon (among those commenting on some recent expressed views on homosexuality) we would be obliged to prohibit the dissemination of certain scriptures that denounce homosexuality.
Both the Quran and the two testaments of the Bible are explosively homophobic to the point that it is impossible for Muslim, Christian, or Jew, to profess belief in their version of God and observe fidelity to their revealed texts, and to reconcile pro-homosexuality with what their scriptures clearly decry as the desecration of the human self by LGBT.
Mr Kissoon, issued from another faith that has a representation in Guyana through thousands of born members, may cite, as had Swami Aksharananda, a tradition of tolerance of homosexuality as evidence of that faith’s acceptance of what the Abrahamic religions explicitly denounce.
It is therefore interesting to read also that Dr Faith Harding, with the authority of the sciences (a psychologist) claims that practitioners of the LGBT lifestyle are fragilised by public intolerance and the anger and stress it creates – a higher level of depression with a 95% incident rate thrown out somewhere to underline the extent of the suffering. It would be considered normal by many that the act of sodomy catalyses psychic and spiritual disorder. It is however questionable that we are generating suicides caused by chronic depression among homosexuals. Dr Hardinjg needs to make her case or correct the newspaper report that attributes these remarks to her. They are without scientific foundation.
Of course the entire pro LGBT campaign is based on false premises. We challenge Messrs Kissoon, Lewis and other sympathisers to define the principle that underlies their argument in favour of full acceptance of any, all or a specific sexual practice. It cannot be the right of everyone to dispose of body and soul as they see fit. No society is founded on such a principle. Sexuality, from an anthroplogical point of view is the human activity subject to the greatest complex of rules. Invariable in each human community are regulations governing mating and family construction. Psychologists are said to understand the universality of incest taboos in human communities.
They do not insist that incest may not have occurred in special circumstances, but the structuralist, as to some extent the functionalists argue that a macro system is observable and that for cohesion some practices are generalised among us to the exclusion of others. Homosexuality may be considered, by these approaches, dysfunctional behaviour and, like incest inadmissible except as a minority phenomenon.
The question of how groups relate to minority behaviour has been raised within the context of the elaboration of human rights philosophy in modern times.
This argumentation is ahistoric in that it ignores the spread and responses to homosexuality in, for example, ancient Greece or Biblical times and the variability or consistency of responses to LGBT. No human community functions on the principle that there are no taboos in sexual behaviour.
What the LGBT activists are advocating is the redefinition of the rules of taboo to read that any behaviour between two consenting competents should be admissible. It opposes, to the often narrow rules governing mating and kinship (cousin marriage laws vary widely in time and place, for example, often within the same faith communities) to a version of sexual behaviour that approaches the story of ancient savagery promoted by Marxist Soviet anthropologists following their interpreation of the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, and Engels’ adoption of his theory of a “promiscuous horde.” The promiscuous horde at the start of the human community shared women and sex freely without regard to rules, we may think.
What we may be living, according to a materialist reading of history, is a change of the social, economic and class conditions that take us back to a period before the imposition of strictures that would penalise the homosexual community. It is in a sense a reversal in some ways as much as it is falsely portrayed as a progress. The Abrahamic religions may be criticised as patriarchal and paternalistic systems and the construction of maleness as one of its products.
The construction of a homosexual identity and all that implies, and its tolerance, nay, promotion, does not enjoy universal approval in this time. It has in some communities in the past. The revealed scriptures are explicit in their denunciation of this lifestyle.
The LGBT advocates therefore have to be clear as to the role of believers in these faiths in the social debate that the transition we are living renders both inevitable and necessary.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr