Holier than thou

BC PIRES

IN THE SAME week, a big one even by the limitless standards of Trinidadian excess, a 17-year-old child was charged with the murder of a newborn one, and one of TT’s most globally successful citizens was outed as lesbian.

And, notwithstanding this glaring concurrence, religious believers will still refuse to put their fingers on the one thing that brings the two together: total firetrucking ignorance, masquerading as moral righteousness.

The same people who were horrified last week that Justice Devindra Rampersad, in the Jason Jones case, declared the buggery law unconstitutional will be horrified this week that a 17-year-old could allegedly commit murder; and they will be convinced that “the family” can only be saved by re-criminalising homosexual sex and the nation by the reintroduction of the death penalty.

And both positions are equally ignorant; and just as ineffective.

In an ideal world, outside the bedroom, sexual orientation wouldn’t arise. It shouldn’t matter one firetrucking whit whether you “run man” or “run woman,” once you run your 200 metres, your company, your office or your courtroom well. However, in the backward Third World, which stretches from Nigeria to Nebraska and includes Trinidad and Texas, LGBT people know that, to live as themselves, the way God presumably made them, is to invite discrimination at best and destruction at worst.

In Iran and Iraq, two of the holiest places in the world, if you believe the men who do not just speak, but harangue, for God, homosexuals and lesbians live in daily fear. Mass killings of LGBT people are tolerated, if not actively encouraged. In Iran, a father — or even a grandfather — can kill his suspected gay child or grandchild and he will not be prosecuted for murder; it is considered an “honour” killing if the child should happen to be LGBT and its slaughterer should happen to be male.

In one of the most grotesque illustrations of male privilege in the Islamic world, Iranian females are not afforded the same defence for destroying their own LGBT child — though, in all of the religious world, they would all be piously denied an abortion. In the rampantly proudly Catholic El Salvador, where the zygote is loved like nowhere else in Heaven or Hell, women are sent to jail as abortionists if they have a natural miscarriage; they lose baby and liberty alike, in the name of God.

In Uganda, the most proudly homo-hating country in the world that did not invent reggae, a statutory death penalty for being gay had to be declared unconstitutional by the courts. In Jamaica, vicious, bloody, cruel and revolting killings of LGBT people are not even investigated by the police. In Honduras, the murder of the transgender is almost a team sport.

How religious does Trinidad and Tobago want to be?

How many lovers of God can hardly wait until they can rain some God-sanctioned hatred on their fellow human beings?

There are groups, all of them defiantly religious, which after last week’s ruling in the Jason Jones case, either overtly or covertly, threatened violence against the LGBT. (If it were not a matter of literal life-and-death, the tragicomedy would be almost delicious, that thugs declaring themselves to be Muslim openly assaulted LGBT people on the Hall of Justice steps last week, while the Pentecostals limited themselves to a veiled threat.)

It is no accident that the Church of England in England should be increasingly tolerant of differences amongst people — female priests, marriage and parenthood equality — while the Church of England in Africa is moving even faster towards an aggressive intolerance: religiosity rises wherever economies collapse; financially, as things get better for people, things get worse for their pastors.

But it is deliberate when the most ignorant, uneducated and intolerant members of any religion are allowed to dominate its public visage.

Where were all the decent priests, pundits and imams last week, when the most defenceless of God’s children needed them most? Why where there no decent Muslim men standing between the thugs of God and the angels — or at least the fairies —they threatened?

Where was the Catholic archbishop? Could not Jason (Gordon) the Good hold hands on this human issue with Jason (Jones) the Gay?

Where, indeed, were all the believers who know, in their hearts, that their churches’ doctrines must be as wrong about the LGBT today as they were about the slave trade 400 years ago?

You find yourself hoping that it wasn’t on the steps of the Magistrates Court, braying for the hanging of a child.

BC Pires is doubting Thomas, Jason, Claude etc. Read a longer version of this column and more of his writing at www.BCPires.com