May 6, 2006

Dear Sir,

The Rev. Lorne Bean, Pastor of Bright Temple AME Church in Warwick, has finally brought the AME Church out of the closet in terms of equal legal rights for gays. I must assume that Rev. Bean speaks for the AME Church in its entirety and will not again refer to him personally for fear of this letter being misinterpreted as a personal attack. It is not. I do not know Rev. Bean and do not wish to. It is an attack on the religious, spiritual, social and constitutional values of the Church for which he speaks. I will take the points set out in the letter to the Sun in the order presented.

The first error is to claim that Bermuda?s laws are based on Biblical principles.

They are nothing of the kind. They are based on ancient English common law with its roots in part in paganism.

This common law has been modified over many centuries in the civil courts. It has been modified by statute in elected parliaments, both in Britain and in Bermuda. To claim that it is Bible based is just plain wrong.

It is claimed that, ?The scripture is too deeply rooted in this Island?s heritage for us to be called a secular society.? This too is just plain wrong. Bermuda has a written constitution that specifically enshrines freedom of religion as one of our fundamental constitutional rights.

Every right has a corresponding duty. The duty that corresponds with the guarantee of freedom of religion is the duty not to impose purely religious beliefs on those who do not accept or agree with them. We are fast approaching another world war because Islam believes otherwise.

The AME Church, then, unconstitutionally claims the Bible as ?our main cultural reference?. This is something the AME church is perfectly entitled to believe, just as I am perfectly entitled not to believe it. Taking it as our ?main cultural reference? the AME Church picks out one of hundreds of ancient Hebrew Laws (the Holiness Code) and uses it as a ?cultural reference? in an age, place, and culture that is completely alien to that of the Hebrews of 3,000 years ago.

Every Pastor and every member of every AME congregation certainly and constantly break the laws of the ancient Hebrews? Holiness Code many times every day.

This is because the Code is obviously almost as unsuited to our modern culture, Christian or not, as it was in fact to the ancient Hebrew culture. The Holiness code was in specific reference to those in performance of Temple rituals.

Logic demands that the AME church accepts the Holiness code in its entirety or not at all. It does not, would not, and could not do so. It should stop harping on the single aspect of it that the Church selectively picks out in support of its otherwise unjustifiable prejudice. In anticipation of the AME Church?s future attempt to use the Epistles of Paul to justify its prejudice, it should be noted that Paul clearly believed that the acts he witnessed were above all idolatrous, his principle objection, and also ?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 between five and ten percent of the world?s population.

The AME Church, like many other churches, thinks it controls 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 only marginally clear that the Hebrews, in their Holiness Code, disapproved homosexual acts.

This, it is abundantly clear, was because they, in common with almost all other ancient cultures, thought of sexual penetration as an act of possession and dominance.

This now exploded notion persists in our sexual circumlocutions of today. The Hebrews considered that the person sexually penetrated was debased to the level of a woman, the status of a chattel in that patriarchal society.

The Hebrew objection was not to the sex, but to the perceived debasement of a man to the chattel status of women.

The AME Church, however, seeks to deny human and civil rights to gays based on their prejudiced and erroneous interpretation of a single item in the Holiness Code. It ignores the rest and, even more to the point, it ignores the Commandment against adultery. When the AME Church seeks to deprive adulterers of human and civil rights by law, it will at last have some vestige of logic on its side.

To do that would, however, be equally unconstitutional. It would also deprive the AME Church of more than half its adherents.

Gross hypocrisy, one must assume, will continue to be the AME Church?s guiding principle.

The AME Church?s 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 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 AME interpretation of God?s plan is just plain wrong. All the evidence speaks to the contrary.

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?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 AME church and others like it can bring themselves to do so and to stop preaching and promoting hatred they cannot be considered Christian. In the meantime AME Pastors and other like-minded 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 last week.

PERSECUTED

WARWICK