FROM THE BOUNDARY

Next to my bed, I have an inscribed photo of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The inscription reads simply, “God Bless you”. I’m not sure of the provenance of the photo and there’s no named person being blessed. So there’s a real sense that he’s blessing me, waking and sleeping, and it might as well be you. I find it enlivening and comforting that a black Archbishop, unlike so many prelates of the Church, without stealth has confronted in his life, and in the name of Jesus and our shared commonality, some of the issues which be-devil us; and though I don’t accept all his positions, I recognise his superior wisdom, knowledge, compassion and experience. At root, he recognises with Hippocrates, as in my small way I do too, that “There is one common breathing, one common flow; all things are in sympathy.”

Though, as Tutu says, he reads the Bible every day, unlike so many he doesn’t swallow it whole. It’s a library of books, he says, and “there are certain parts you have to say ‘no’ to... there are many things you shouldn’t accept”. One of these is what the Bible says about gayness and lesbianism. Homophobia, Tutu says, is like racism, a crime against humanity, and it’s as abhorrent – for just as we can’t do anything about our skin colour, neither can we do anything about our sexual orientation either. It’s absurd that in the Church so much time is spent worrying about “what do I do in bed and with whom” when we face so many terrible things in our world. If God is homophobic, he says, “I wouldn’t worship that God”. I wouldn’t either, and I can’t avoid giving enormous weight to what Tutu has said, and his blessing ever buttresses my thoughts on all this.

Tutu isn’t the only black prelate to argue in these terms. There’s Bishop Tengatenga of Malawi, for example, our guest at the Diocesan service this year. With others, he argued that the Anglican primates had acted ultra vires in their treatment of the US Episcopal Church, which I wrote of last week, and had no power to discipline a member Church of the Communion. The upshot is that the Primates made a mess of it. They were not so much “walking with God” as stumbling and tripping. There’s also, of course, Bishop and Primate Michael Curry of the US Episcopal Church. After the rebuff of the Anglican Primates, Curry signalled hope not despair: “We are part of the Jesus Movement, and the cause of God’s love in this world can never stop and will never be defeated.”

The upshot is that the idea of “cultural and religious convictions”, in Bishop John Holder’s phrase, as if that’s an overriding reality is no more than sleight of hand, a cop out. There’s no one strand of Christianity even here in the Caribbean, and even if there were, that, of itself, wouldn’t be a knock down argument about what’s right in Jesus’ name. Then again, race and colour are not determinants of LGBT-ism. There are LGBT people in every society, and all of us are a complex mixture of male and female. Kinsey’s figures – the famous ten per cent – may or may not be an accurate assessment of the ratio of heterosexual to LGBT people in a given society, but in any event the percentage is not trivial. Most researchers agree that merely to ask a person into which category he or she falls is misleading because it ignores the fact that many, who wouldn’t be prepared to say they were LGBT, have yet experienced same sex attraction at some point in their lives. LGBT-ism, it’s now agreed, is not a mental illness and its causes are biological. The ‘-ism’ is to be distinguished from the expression – and it’s not something which is ‘chosen’ because you don’t choose your desires. It’s all been with us since the dawn of time and how it fits with evolution theory is a mystery. It can’t be ‘cured’, as those who’ve tried it in God’s name now agree with abject apologies to their former ‘patients’. From primates to gut worms, over 500 other species exhibit same sex attraction. So much for the ‘it’s unnatural’ argument. And please don’t say it can be given up, like smoking or gluttony. By contrast, only one species exhibits homophobia – guess which. LGBT-ism isn’t a ‘choice’ and so isn’t restricted by crude biological and social roles. It’s not a threat to baby-making and the survival of the species, nor to the integrity of the human sex organs, nor to you and me. Heterosexual sex doesn’t exclude anal intercourse. Unlike Saturn, an LGBT person will not eat your children despite the dire, and profoundly silly, warnings of some. The same moral constraints, and the same overarching power of love, govern both LGBT and heterosexual people. Oh yes – and LGBT-ism doesn’t cause earthquakes.

Now I realise all of this is mere assertion and you can give what weight to it you please. Maybe you’ll confront your prejudices, if you have them, and research it too. At root, it’s all about religious belief anyway and what Satan is up to. For ‘thumbs down’ people, the rest is just window dressing. Let me pay tribute to those few brave correspondents to our newspapers who’ve said as much.

Then there’s the issue of human rights. Last week, I mentioned the blackmail said, by Archbishop John in 2013, to be directed to us by developed nations, in particular the UK in the words of then Prime Minister, David Cameron, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit at Perth, Australia, in 2011. Cameron had referred not to same-sex marriage, as Archbishop John had implied, but to State-sponsored violence against gays, discrimination, and repressive penal laws directed against gay people. In fact, his remarks simply corroborated those of Indian Commonwealth Secretary General, Kamalesh Sharma, who had claimed that those things violated Commonwealth values incorporated in the Affirmation of Commonwealth Values of 2009, and a 2011 Resolution of the UN Human Rights Council on LGBT rights. The upshot is that I’m not sure what Archbishop John was about. Was it just sour-faced post-Colonial posturing, playing to the gallery of ‘get off our back-ness’? I don’t know. But, for what it’s worth, I don’t think for a moment he stands against the LGBT community – quite the opposite, in fact. Why on earth would the Diocese invite the then Presiding Bishop of the US Episcopal Church, Bishop Jefferts Schori, and Bishop Tengatenga to our Diocesan services? It’s a bit of a tease, isn’t it? I suppose there’s more than one way of changing minds and hearts, and more than one way of leading and following.

Go safely, then – until the next time.

Yes, you’re right – De Profundis from the boundary: “Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the City of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it on a summer’s day. And so a child could.” – Oscar Wilde