In reaction to Prime Minister David Cameron’s saying that Britain might suspend aid to African nations that banned homosexuality, The Lowdown spent some of last Friday’s column defending Barbados’ right to hang murderers and hate homos, or at least append snide comments to pictures of them kissing; and I wondered, again, why anyone is bothered by what consenting adults do in their bedrooms.
Nobody gives a flying firetruck what others do in their living rooms or kitchens, apart from maybe boiling cabbage in a poorly ventilated apartment block. So why do they poke their noses into other people’s bedrooms?
Is it that they secretly want to poke their noses in their business? Even The Lowdown, who is often close to liberal, can play along with teasing homosexuals. Would he tease people in wheelchairs? But at least he recognizes homosexuals as human, which is more than most pastors will do.
Once you ignore the supposedly holy books – which I reject outright in toto, so to speak, and certainly as grounds for public policy – there is no reason to even form an opinion about homosexuals or lesbians.
You might just as sensibly rage against short people; or black ones; or, if you’re a literal believer in the Old Testament or The Koran, bacon.
It’s the great irony of our age, greater even than Israel’s neo-Third Reich approach to Palestine, that black people as a group should hold the most rigid prejudice against homosexuals.
Black homo-haters don’t even notice that they rely on the same illogical “justifications” for their groundless, unreasoning hatred that were used to justify the worst historical excesses against black people; the irony becomes steely.
Once you apply reason to prejudice, it vanishes. People who thought black people were inferior could never prove it logically. People who think lesbians and homosexuals are “wrong” are in the same predicament.
Without recourse to a “holy” book – all of which have been used to justify mankind’s worst atrocities down through history – there is no justification for hating God’s other creatures simply because they are different.
Indeed, those who follow Jesus Christ’s example would wash the feet of homosexuals, not stone them.
The choice facing societies today is between God’s way, the loving tolerance of all our neighbours, or man’s way – the rigid imposition of unquestionable doctrine that would deny the most basic facts such as the age of the Earth, equal rights of the female gender and children, and the complete non-holiness of sex, and substitute a supposedly “revealed” truth.
Societies should err on the side of tolerance and intelligence rather than intolerance and doctrine.
I reckon there is only one reason other people care about what lesbians and homosexuals do behind closed doors: they’re secretly jealous.
A gay friend once told me that if he wanted to find out which married man he should pick up in a social gathering, he had only to provoke an anti-gay discussion.
Whoever ranted loudest, wildest and most hatefully against homos, he said, would, later on, not be talking that way at all.
