Striking the right balance on gay rights
Published:Sunday | May 6, 2018 | 12:00 AMBasil Hylton
THE EDITOR, Sir:
I'm a Roman Catholic, a Jamaican and happily married to a woman for 45 years. While I agree with Peter Espeut ('Fake news and the gay agenda', Gleaner, May 4, 2018) that one's constitutional right to equality before the law is the principle that each human being is subject to the same law, surely the LGBTQI argument is that Jamaica's buggery law is unjust, and that they therefore reserve the right to actively militate for its change.
As a sociologist, Mr Espeut should give some credence to the argument that in the 21st century, and within a democratic society, the right of each adult to personal intimacy with another consenting adult is, or should be, the principal law on which all adult sexual activities and responsibilities are based.
Denying LGBTQI a right to which they think they are entitled can too easily be seen as merely trying to dictate what adults should do when being intimate between each other.
Of far more importance, however, is the need for a genuine morally based tenet that sits alongside the recognition of our environmental obligations to Mother Earth. One that spells out, for example, that marriage between one man and a woman (for all the physical, psychological and sociological complementarities this offers) is ultimately in the interest of philanthropy (i.e., the real opposite of homophobia).
For as the LGBTQI has shown in Britain, the right to intimacy is far from their real political endgame. For neither a change in the law nor the making of civil partnerships legal has satisfied that political lobbying voice. No, using the arguments of the victims of racism and of the need for equality is but the means to a wider socio-political end.
BASIL HYLTON