Peter Espeut | Please reason with me

The saying goes that great minds discuss ideas while small minds discuss people – engaging in personal attacks rather than dissecting the issues and making logical refutations. Often, it is because they cannot refute ideas they do not like that some people turn to personal vilification.

My column published on August 9 was in response to an assertion by gay activist Maurice Tomlinson, who is married to a Canadian man, that he wished to normalise same-sex marriage in Jamaica. I argued: “An important front in the war to normalise homosexuality involves changing the normal meanings of familiar but important words – like ‘marriage’. LGBTQI activists – including the editor of this newspaper – would have us believe that the union of two men or two women should be legalised and dignified with the word ‘marriage’. Legalisation into some sort of civil union is one thing … but calling that union ‘marriage’ does violence to the English language and centuries and millennia of human history.”

Ouch! The contents of my column mashed the corns of LGBTQI activists, four of whom wrote extensive pieces mostly attacking me, rather than the ideas I expressed.

Dr Ethon Lowe was first out of the blocks (August 23): “The word of marriage has only one meaning in custom and in law: the voluntary union of one man and one woman,” he rejoins. “Not anymore … . The latest of the rights revolutions unfolding now is marriage between persons of the same sex. I can now get married to a person of my own sex and even marry myself. Same-sex marriages are now recognised by law in a growing number of countries, although in many others, including good ol’ homophobic Jamaica … marriages continue to be allowed only between a man and a woman.”

THINK FOR YOURSELVES

But it is this latest claim of the ‘rights revolutionaries’ that I contest. He avoids debate by proposing that we ‘follow-fashion’, because a growing number of countries allow same-sex marriages, it must be right for us. I prefer to think for myself, rather than ‘follow-fashion’.

My erstwhile schoolmate, Gordon Robinson, was next (on August 25), and he mixed satirical personal abuse with non sequiturs. “For hundreds of years in Jamaica and thousands of years in the rest, supported by scriptural dogma, the word ‘slave’ had only one meaning in custom and law. Conquered races were to be slaves for their conquerors. Some nations, with the Church’s full support, kidnapped and transported ‘slaves’ across the Atlantic then sold them at public auctions to provide free labour for their ‘owners’. Slaves were raped and sodomised as their owners desired with zero sanction from Church or state.”

Surely, learned counsel cannot expect to win his same-sex marriage case by citing slavery as a parallel precedent. But then he is the expert on marriage (with the Ball and Chain), as he so often expounds. “Maybe,” he contends, “it’s time to abolish ‘marriage’, whose historical definition has been stoutly defended by religious fanatics for the sole purpose of maintaining a legal framework for the social slavery of women.” Irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial to the same-sex marriage issue, learned counsel.

The abusive Annie Kitchin chimed in on August 27, decrying the “putrid miasma of the homophobic lynch mob, of which – sadly – Peter Espeut is one of the representatives”. She asserts: “Take the assumption that marriage is a religious rite, invented by the Church. It most decidedly is NOT!” Of course, I made no such assumption, and her argument goes downhill from there.

Matthew Baker’s piece (August 28) titled ‘Homophobia: our ticket to heaven?’ does further violence to the English language by harping on the word ‘homophobia’, which is a term of abuse invented by LGBTQI activists to suggest that those that disagree with them are mentally ill. More abuse.

I really would prefer debate to abuse.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and academic dean at St Michael’s Theological College. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.