October 30, 2006

FOR those old enough to remember or for those with sufficient historical knowledge the recent “Interfaith Service” held at the National Stadium was sickeningly reminiscent of Hitler’s Nazi rallies at Nuremburg in the 1930s.The screaming and ranting of the speakers could be heard, literally, for miles around and for hours on end.

The principle behind Hitler’s Nazi rallies and this “Interfaith Service”, however, is exactly the same. It is a rally using hatred to promote crowd hysteria and solidarity behind that hatred for political ends. In Hitler’s case it ended in a World War and the extermination of six million Jews.

We have a situation in Bermuda where the churches, mainly the black churches, are actively campaigning to deny equal protection of the law for gay Bermudians. The churches are wrong to campaign against this equal legal protection for several reasons including theological reasons, social reasons, and constitutional reasons.

The churches’ campaign has, until the recent Nazi-style rally, been almost entirely surreptitious. Almost nothing has been said in public except by the pastor of the Warwick AME Church, Lorne Bean, and the chairman of the Tourist Board, Andre Curtis. Bean has suggested that “homosexuality angers, incenses, infuriates, royally ticks off God”. It is, he declares, an”abomination” before God.

The absurdity of this statement is manifest in several ways. There is absolutely no evidence that God, in any Christian as opposed to ancient Hebrew concept of God, gets “royally ticked off” at all. It is a stupid, colloquial simile that demeans God and reduces God to an irascible idiot standing on the sidelines and jumping up and down in impotent rage. It is quite clear that after many thousands of years of homosexuality, if it were truly an “abomination” to God, God wouldn’t have allowed it in the first place or at least would have done something to eliminate it. God has done no such thing despite endless vicious persecutions by “His” churches and mosques.

It is just as easy to argue that the Levitical prohibition (pertaining, incidentally, only to those involved in temple rituals) doesn’t refer to homosexuality at all, but merely to a single sexual act. The sexual act was thought of in ancient times as an act of domination and possession of a female who had only chattel status. Thus a similar act between men would reduce a man to the status of a woman.

To the ancient world a woman was the possession of first her father, then her husband. Adultery was tantamount to the theft of another’s property. It also jeopardised the transfer of property by inheritance from father to son because any doubt about paternity clouded the issue of whether the child was indeed the son of his father. Women, of course, didn’t inherit; they were bequeathed. The modern non-Islamic world has matured well beyond such barbaric ideas.

“Abominations”, biblically, are many. They vary from eating shellfish to “lying with a man as with a woman”. Lorne Bean has been seen to eat shellfish himself, and has observed large groups of people eating shellfish in his presence without once raising the cry of “abomination”. He wears clothing of mixed fibres without a qualm despite the fact that to do so is also unequivocally prohibited in Leviticus. He works on the Sabbath, also prohibited not only in Leviticus but also by the Ten Commandments. Mr. Bean is clearly the most appalling of hypocrites. His prurient obsession with the sexual practices of an inoffensive minority of the population merely betrays a filthy, prejudiced mind and a profoundly uncharitable nature.

No one has made anything resembling a public justification on other than religious grounds as to why gays should be deprived of the equality before the law granted to everyone else. The black churches have waged a nasty and until recently secretive, hole-in-corner campaign behind the scenes, threatening a Government already rightly scared to death of the next election, with a largely mythical but nevertheless believable “church vote”.

Logic demands that the black churches accept the Holiness code in its entirety or not at all. It does not, would not, and could not do so. Even the Pharisees couldn’t follow it perfectly and everyone knows Christ’s opinion of the Pharisees. The black churches should bear Christ’s opinion in mind as they try to follow so energetically in the Pharisees’ footsteps.

The black churches should stop harping on a single aspect of the Holiness Code that they selectively pick out in support of its utterly unjustifiable campaign of prejudice and hate.

The black churches have also attempted to use the Epistles of Paul to justify its prejudice. It should be noted that Paul clearly believed that the acts he thought he witnessed were above all idolatrous, as they probably were. This was his principal objection, but he also assumed, with no evidence whatever to go on, that the acts he witnessed were “against the nature” of the idolaters. He may or may not have been correct on the second point but modern science now knows that homosexual orientation is, in fact, the nature of about five per cent of the world’s population.

It took the Roman Catholic Church until 1992 to absolve Galileo of heresy. That was more than 400 years after his condemnation. Churches are notoriously slow to face reality when reality fails to conform to dogma. For the Roman Church the sun, moon and stars all revolved around the earth according to biblical authority until 1992, all the scientific evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. The black churches in Bermuda are taking the same wilfully ignorant stance today.

The black churches, like many other churches and religions, think they control what God approves and does not approve. As far as the Biblical evidence goes, we have it on its best authority that Moses said that God said: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” It is, however, by no means absolutely clear that the Hebrews, in their Holiness Code, disapproved of all homosexual acts.

The black churches, however, seek to deny equal human and civil rights to gays based on their prejudiced and erroneous interpretation of a single item in the Holiness Code. They ignore the rest and, even more to the point, they ignore the Commandment against adultery. When the black churches seek to deprive adulterers of human and civil rights by law, they will at last have some vestige of logic on their side. It would also deprive the black churches of more than half their adherents and half their income. Gross hypocrisy and prejudice will continue to be the black churches’ guiding principles.

The black churches’ somewhat blasphemous notion that “homosexuality angers, incenses, infuriates, royally ticks off God” must, if true at all, be far more true of adulterers. It suggests, according to Bean, that homosexuality “violates God’s sensibilities along with God’s physiological, emotional and social design for humanity”. Why then have there always been, still are, and always will be, until humanity destroys itself and God’s earth with it, a significant percentage of people whose nature is homosexual. Obviously the black churches’ interpretation of God’s plan is just plain wrong. All the evidence speaks to the contrary. There is no scientific evidence whatever that supports their off-the-wall position.

To be considered Christian, people, pastors and churches must at least try to obey the two commandments of Jesus Christ. The first is to love God, which would include respecting God|0xb9|s creation, not telling God what God’s design should have been. The second is to love your neighbour as yourself.

This includes your homosexual neighbour. Until the black churches and others like them can bring themselves to do so and to stop preaching and promoting hatred they cannot be considered Christian churches. In the meantime the pastors of the black churches and other likeminded clergy should read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Luke 10, 25-37 and so try to avoid another such explosion of hatred as we witnessed this year.

To be a sin at all, being homosexual must be a deliberate choice. It is now scientifically certain that it is no such thing. To suggest otherwise is to fly in the face of all the scientific and all the social evidence. It is akin to having blue rather than brown eyes or to being left-handed rather than right. To believe otherwise is to display the most determined, wilful ignorance of the reality in which we all live. Even to fall under the Levitical prohibition the sexual act must be only one of many others possible; the others should thus be perfectly acceptable to any church.

To determine what homosexual acts took place between consenting adults in private would be the act of a police state and would certainly not be the business of any church under a constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the behaviour of the “Interfaith” churches is this dependence on rumour and innuendo as the basis of their hatred. For anyone actually to witness a homosexual act is rare indeed. Without such evidence who is to know with certainty that someone is or is not homosexual and if so what sexual acts they indulge? The moral ground upon which these hatred-spewing churches think they stand is in fact a suppurating sewer of moral quicksand.

In more practical terms it is abundantly clear that adultery and fornication both have severely destructive social consequences. No such destructive consequences can be ascribed to the gay community. Homosexually oriented men and women do not break up families; neither do they litter the island with single-parent children to be left to grow up without a proper family environment. Such children become the gang members of tomorrow.

If these churches were other than the horribly prejudiced hate-mongers they are they wouldn’t waste their time urging their deluded followers to hate inoffensive gays: they would be doing their best to combat adultery and fornication so pervasive in our immoral community.

Present at the Nuremburg-style rally held in the name of “faith” were the leaders of both political parties. They both thus proudly demonstrated their contempt for the Bermuda Constitution.

To listen with apparent equanimity to such political ranting and raving by clergy who are supposedly Christian in the furtherance of denying legal equality to a legally unidentifiable minority of Bermudians is an act betraying their constitutional responsibility to maintain freedom of religion in this benighted Island. The black churches are perfectly entitled to their idiotic religious opinions.

Our Government and Opposition are, however, constitutionally bound to ignore them insofar as the law of the land is concerned. Even to be seen at this Nazi-style hate rally was of deeply questionable political morality.

“P” has now been stabbed in the back by his political cronies in much the same way as was his predecessor. The collective morality of the PLP as a supposedly cohesive organisation is deeply suspect.

It is clearly riven with discord and personal dislikes. In the presumably short tenure of office customarily allowed to PLP Premiers by their political cohorts, Dr. Brown will have the opportunity to demonstrate his medical knowledge, his constitutional obligations, and his desire to put the “progressive” back in the PLP programme by supporting Renée Webb’s long overdue amendment. Anything less than such support will taint Dr. Brown with the stench of cowardice.

PERSECUTED

Warwick