I have decided to invest some of my valuable time to discuss an issue as mundane as this because I verily believe that (and this is taken from Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail) we should not ‘rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes…’ Most people never bother to listen to any other reasoning, whether specious or foolish with respect to issues of homosexuality. I cannot hold them culpable for the way they think, particularly as we are from a cultural, social and economic background (and that includes our reasoning) best known as ‘developing’.
Leviticus 18:22 is a very strong position from where the God-has-said-it apologists advance their argument. That portion of the Holy Bible categorically says that a man must not have sex with another man. That is cool stuff but I would first seek to understand sex and what it really is. Sex is cognitive – and that big grammar ordinarily seeks to highlight the fact that I do not want to have sex with another person simply because that person is male or female. I want to have sex with another person because I have been wired that way – as a man or woman, there’s a micro-chip embedded in our brains. It beeps and burrs and whirrs when we see other members of the opposite sex who appeal to our senses and emotions. All the activity that leads to, and guides and stimulates our neurons and electrons and impulses begin and end in the brain. The minute I do not have ‘feelings’ for a member of the opposite sex, I’m likely not want to have sex with that person even if we are male and female.
Now some people are not wired the same way we are. For them, and unfortunately, their parentage may have been responsible for their being born with irregular mental and sometimes physical and emotional morphology. And that perhaps is the reason why in a family of three, the one child could be straight whilst the other two ‘unstraight’ or everyone would be straight. And in some unusual circumstances, their births as homosexuals may have little or nothing to do with parental lifestyles. Others are a product of choice – they find themselves trapped in a body and an environment, and that body and brain refuses to respond to the whirr and burr and beeps from the micro-chip in their brains that regulate their sexuality. But the point must be made quickly that many of these people born that way, are born much the same way as Siamese are born.
So for me, I see somebody who cannot respond to these impulses as a bit of an irregular person – now this irregularity is not an illness like malaria or typhoid fever or cancer from which you can get a cure by buying medicine from a shelf or via surgical operation. It is so fundamental and so sad a condition that instead of the flak directed at them, I should prefer to love and accept and tolerate them for what condition they sincerely and genuinely did not campaign to get involved.
And I cannot help but express myself on the hypocrisy of the God-has-said-it apologists, who insist on burning, or boiling or cremating homosexuals alive out rightly, and who insist that they have no rights whatsoever. For me, the God-has-said-it apologists are no different in their thinking from that of the Dark Ages, who believed that the earth was flat, or who still believe that the Sun rises from the East, or who burnt innocent people at the stakes because they were different somehow. If you take the statistics, they are many God-has-said-it apologists who go about the place enjoying products of the intellect and skill which sometimes are the direct or indirect byproducts from homosexuals. That computer, that state-of-the-art car, that iPod and iPod that you cradle like a toy, you think they fell from heaven like some manna? Take the statistics again, and you will find out that in that chain of production and at some point of its manufacture, that person you abhor for not having their sex like you do may have made some significant contribution to that toy of yours. And you know what? They were able to make these contributions because they live in societies that tolerate and understand that these are human beings first of all before their sexual irregularity.
And again, I can understand why and how this very mundane topic so engages law makers, opinion leaders and religious people worldwide. Their claim is that irregularity of sex of a very insignificant number of people would one day wipe people off the face of the earth, and in spite of myself I am chuckling at this. Others say marriage is the bedrock of humanity, and so if people who have their sex irregularly are allowed to live as married couples, procreation would be lost. I would quickly tell this later group that their literal interpretation of that passage is what is responsible for most of the economic and social problems we have today. Take for example a man in Africa earning less than a dollar a day: he has three wives and 40 children – his excuse for being this irresponsibly fecund would be Genesis 1v28 or some part of the Holy Koran that ‘allows’ him marry up to four wives, unmindful that those holy passages did not only talk about procreation but also about a ‘dominion’, and a ‘replenishing’ of the earth – irresponsibly populating the earth cannot be what the Bible and Koran passages really meant – and that may be why I will not want to join issues with those who insist that those people who have irregular sex must not adopt children.
I would put my country, Nigeria on the spot: there are much more fundamental issues that steadily threaten to wipe us out – things like extreme poverty in a land so rich; things like a potential outbreak of cholera in satellite towns in Abuja where some people live like rats and cockroaches while those in government like live dukes and duchesses; things like climate change and how our lifestyles contribute to the increase in the depletion of the ozone layer. These things and more, I believe, are the things we should focus our attention – a focusing on the irregular sex habits of some people, believe me is mundane and an unnecessary patronage.
