One of Cayman’s local legislators (an elected member of
our mini-parliament) is in hot water from the liberals among us for defending
his selective Old Testament Christianity. His god disapproves of sodomy, and so
does he.
His chief critic is the expat Chairman of our
government-appointed Human Rights Commission; he believes in equal rights for
homosexuals. The politician says the Chairman should be replaced by a
Christian, by which he means an Old Testament Christian of his own persuasion.
As a human-rights advocate myself, and a fairly devout heathen,
I agree with the Chairman on the equal-rights issue. Also as a human rights
advocate, though, I believe in free speech, and must defend the politician’s
right to speak his mind on the issue.
He (the polly) has not called for violence, or the
jailing of sodomites, or even (I think) the legal banning of homosexual acts of
passion. To the best of my knowledge he has not joined in any of the public
protests against the “gay cruises” that visit Cayman from time to time. This
being Cayman, his words of disapproval don’t amount to an incitement to violence
– though they do encourage discrimination. What to do?
In recent years, around the world, the right to free
speech has taken a bit of a bashing. There are laws in some otherwise civilized
European nations that actually prosecute and
jail people for questioning any detail of the orthodox story of the Nazi
holocaust. (As it relates to Jews, at least: I don’t know the position relating
to Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and the rest. We never read about that.)
The iconic figure of six million dead Jews is legally
sacrosanct, in those nations, and to question it is blasphemy. Doubts are classed
as anti-Semitism, intrinsically likely to provoke a second holocaust of Jews.
Since there is no equivalent stigma attached to details of other Nazi slaughters – or indeed other historical slaughters of
any time and any peoples – can we shrug off the anti-Semitism focus as driven by tribal
hyperbole? I think we can.
Doubting details doesn’t amount to denying the whole
thing. The “denier/denial” label has been picked up by the AGW brigade, who are
keen to imprison heretics who disbelieve the orthodoxy that Global Warming is
all the fault of humankind.
By the same token, quoting a couple of isolated incidents
from the Old Testament constitutes homophobia, according to Mr Eden’s critics, and
makes him a “hater”. Surely that is grossly unfair. Surely he is entitled to
his opinion that all queers will go to hell. It’s only his hell, after all.
At my boarding school we were told that our right to
swing a fist stopped where somebody else’s nose began. Also, that freedom of
speech did not extend to crying “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre, unless there really was a fire. All
freedoms sometimes have to bow to other freedoms.
English common-law has always contained a prohibition
against “disturbing the peace”. The prohibition is often abused by Police and Prosecutors,
but its principle is sound enough. Disrespecting any shibboleth may be permitted
by the human-rights canon; but broadcasting that disrespect in a manner or
place that encourages violence, is not. That seems fair enough.
In The Gay Marriage
Thing (Archives March 2014), I argued against the practice of national
governments to license marriages. However,
if they insist on retaining the practice,
only minimal tweaking would be needed to extend the licences to same-sex
marriages – and to same-family marriages too. Reproduction, or even sexual
congress, is not an essential factor
in any marriage.
Old Testament legends are actually much more tolerant of incest than of sodomy; some of the world’s
most respected religions display a similar tolerance. And a few decades ago
incest was relatively common in Cayman – as in many other isolated villages
around the world. We encountered jokes about incest as soon as we arrived in
Cayman. A father expresses disgust to
learn that his son’s intended bride is a virgin. “If she’s not good enough for
her own family,” he huffs, “she’s not good enough for ours.”
I don’t have much sympathy for Mr Eden as a person. He
was silent during the most recent kerfuffle over free speech, involving our
local newspaper’s Editor. He was silent when I was being persecuted for the
same reason, nearly thirty years ago. He has been silent for forty years about
the officially tolerated abuse of migrant domestics.
Nevertheless… he is entitled to maintain his
personal prejudices, and to advertise them, even if he himself might not be as
generous to others.
