Dear Editor,

The Christian Brethren Assemblies Jamaica (CBAJ) recently hosted a press conference at which they discussed their position paper on homosexuality.

While reading through the document, I lamented the fervour with which church leaders use homosexuality as a wedge issue to keep themselves relevant in public discourse on morality. I encourage anyone interested in seeing firsthand the moral bankruptcy that guides the church’s teachings on homosexuality to read the position paper.

Its contents are used as talking points by all major Christian organisations. Among the most predictable claims outlined is that “homosexual behaviour can be changed” because “many individuals who desire to abstain from homosexual acts have been able to do so”.

However, sexuality is a welldefined predisposition that exists whether or not someone is sexually active. A celibate gay person, or a gay person who initiates intercourse with someone of the opposite sex for functional purposes, is still a gay person.

The position paper goes on to explain that “some homosexual [sexual] acts are physically harmful because they disregard normal human anatomy and function”. Firstly, gays do not have a monopoly on any sexual practice. What the position paper refers to as “homosexual acts” really are just “sexual acts”.

Secondly, while the CBAJ believes the gay “lifestyle” is “obsessed with and/or dominated by personal sexual fulfilment”, “homosexual acts” also include deciding between bush tea or coffee, going to work, volunteering at community charities and supporting friends and family.

Church leaders persistently employ double-speak in addressing homosexuality and homophobia. On one hand, they claim that “anyone struggling with homosexual temptation should evoke neither scorn nor enmity, but evoke our concern, compassion, help, and understanding”. On the other, “the Christian community must help society understand that homosexuality has grave spiritual, emotional, physical, and cultural consequences” and “Christians should oppose legislative attempts to grant special rights based on sexual behaviour”.

As self-proclaimed guardians of public morality, their statements sound noble, until one sees the well-oiled propaganda machine that church leaders utilise to demonise, disenfranchise and silence gay people. You cannot actively work to sustain the cultural environment that makes violence against gay people permissible while claiming you support nonviolence. That is barefaced hypocrisy.

In addition, it is telling that the CBAJ would label as “special rights” the demands made by social justice advocates to recognise the humanity of gays. The rights to privacy, to love, to self-expression, and to dignity cannot be “special rights” if these are human rights and if these rights are already held by the majority.

The position paper includes a number of colourful fables about gay people: homosexuals engage in active recruitment, because, obviously, same-sex attraction is induced, never innate; homosexuals are nonmonogamous and promiscuous by nature, while heterosexuals, by deduction, are predisposed to monogamy; homosexuality and paedophilia are essentially twin perversions, even though paedophiles are repulsed by adults and often molest children of both sexes, while the majority of child sex offenders who have adult relationships are heterosexual; and homosexual parents raise homosexual children, in the same way, I suppose, that heterosexual parents raise only heterosexual children.

Antiquated and harmful narratives about gay people get entrenched when those of us who know better refuse to challenge the fear-mongering and the ignorance of those we consider arbiters of morality and paragons of virtue.

As more gay people affirm their sexual identities, it will become obvious that most are upstanding citizens who are struggling alongside heterosexuals to make the best of a difficult life in Jamaica. The ranks of the most respected professions are replete with gay people. In fact, many Jamaicans are employed and supervised by gays.

As more Jamaican Christians engage with gay couples at home, at school, in communities, and in workplaces, they will reconsider whether God is truly infallible and if His condemnation of samegender loving people is morally absolute. The lies woven into the fabric of public consciousness will begin to unravel and the church will be held in contempt.

Javed Jaghai

sandevaj@gmail.com