Church teachings on homosexuality cruel and outdated

Genetics and neuro-biology make extraordinary entlightenment in their study of same-sex orientation in nature which attests that homosexuality is a naturally occurring variation; social sciences strive to find a modern definition to the notion of gender-couple in order to integrate and  harmonize sexual diversity in societies; pope Francis, at the last Catholic synod, was humbly reflecting on the plastic dimension of  LOVE inside the human sisterhood and human brotherhood; two weeks ago, a space-craft probe aimed at the studying of  the beginning of human life,  launched by the European Air Centre landed on a speeding comet located at 500 million kms from the earth, after a 10 year journey in space.

In spite of all these developments, a certain obscurantism - embodied in recent newspapers articles – continues to look relentlessly in the rear-view mirror.In an article on African autobiography (Politique Africaine 77, Mar 2000) the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe argues that African thought is haunted by three ‘ghosts’: slavery, colonization, and apartheid. After reading these  articles “Homosexuality is a sin, full stop” , “there is no room for homosexuals, as God created men and women to be together and to  have children”,  I would add religion and sexuality to the list of those ‘ghosts’. Or to be precise, the distortion of African sexuality by religion, fundamentalist Christianity in particular.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is obsessed with sexuality. Not of course in the sense of sex as a celebration of love, the senses and life. The Christian obsession with sex – and with the body and its functions as unclean and shameful – is a neurotic compulsion that sees sexuality and the body as inherently wicked and seeks to control sexuality in order to suppress it. But as any psychologist will testify, suppressing natural, healthy instincts only succeeds in creating perversions. This is why the recent avalanche of revelations about sexual abuse of young boys by priests and members of religious orders in many different parts of the world should have come as no surprise (and did not surprise anyone who has been educated in a Christian school).

In Africa, this neurotic fear of sexuality is even more intense thanks to our mental colonization by Christianity. While Europe and the Americas have largely liberated themselves from prehistoric Judeo-Christian taboos around sexuality and the body, Christian fundamentalists in Africa, egged on and funded by a dwindling minority of fanatics in the West, have if anything managed to turn back the clock in this part of the world. Is it not ironic that in countries plagued by political oppression – Uganda is a clear example – it is the same-sex relationships which preoccupy religious consciences?
Under the guise of a “Biblical perspective” and “God’s values, standards and principles” (as Radithlokwa puts it), the pious in Africa are the first to condemn any progressive development in society’s view of sexuality or sexual rights.

They are against the ordination of women and of gays and lesbians, despite a desperate shortage of new priests. They are against not just gay marriage, but family planning, condoms, abortion, and laws against marital rape. Ironically, but not surprisingly, it is in their own families and communities that one finds the highest incidence of sexual promiscuity, unmarried mothers, violence against women, and sexual abuse of women and children.

The teachings of the religious on sex condemn millions to death. According to UN studies, 600,000 women die needlessly during pregnancy every year, while 5.8 million people become HIV-positive and 2.5 million die from AIDS. At the present time more than 28 percent of African children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Yet the Fundamentalist church and its allies have consistently lobbied to block international policies that would make sex and condom education available and promote condom use as an effective tool in the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and in the battle against AIDS.

At a recent world conference on women and population, these reactionary churches successfully led the effort to block the inclusion of safe, legal abortion on the list of women’s basic reproductive rights. In Kenya, a pamphlet sponsored by the Catholic Church falsely stated that HIV can pass through condoms, and in 2003 the Vatican claimed that “serious scientific studies” backed this view. No scientist supported the claim. It was an outright lie. Church teachings on sexuality and sexual rights denigrate women. By condemning contraception and abortion, they deny women the right to control their own bodies.

Even rape victims should not have abortions, according to the church’s morals. The condemnation of homosexuality debars huge numbers of good African Catholics from the sacraments or forces them to become hypocrites. The church’s teaching on homosexuality is so clearly cruel and outdated that it is amazing to find an intellectual of Raditlhokwa’s calibre defending it. Does this scholar not know that the Bible also prescribes the killing of witches, the stoning of adulterers, and the execution of anyone that breaks the Sabbath, not to mention endorsing slavery and genocide? Does this lecturer at our national university really want to build a modern nation on the basis of primitive tribal superstitions?

Thanks to fundamentalist Christians whose minds have been colonized by this foreign ideology, our continent, with the sole exception of South Africa, remains stubbornly closed in its medieval attitude towards homosexuality while the rest of the world, with the predictable exception of fundamentalist Islam, is moving towards a more enlightened understanding. Extensive research has clearly shown that same-sex relationships were tolerated and accepted as natural in many pre-colonial African societies, yet fundamentalist African Christians tell us that homosexuality is an “un-African” import from the West. How absurd, when it is their own religion that is the import!

Blinded by their prejudice, the reactionary churches condemn homosexuality as a “sin” or a “disorder” despite all the scientific evidence that suggests that homosexuality is a naturally occurring variation that cannot be changed, either by prayer or by psychiatric treatment. Exhaustive scientific research has shown conclusively that between 5 and percent of the population is homosexual in every part of the world. In other words, the ratio of gays to straights is basically the same in France, Jamaica, China, Botswana, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, or wherever one goes in the world. The difference is only in the attitude of the society towards homosexuality, repressive and fearful, or open and tolerant.

In effect, the church offers three solutions for homosexuals: stay at home and pretend to be a monk, “sublimate” the sexuality by becoming a priest, or marry and try not to make an unfortunate partner too miserable. All of these “solutions” lead to terrible suffering and perpetuate the bigotry behind which homophobes and gay bashers can hide.But we are in the 21st century. Surely, it is time to recognize that what makes humanity so strong is precisely its diversity. There are multiple interpretations for every human impulse, and dogmatic, closed statements such as “homosexuality is a sin” or “homosexuality is a disorder” are no different from saying that “all Nigerians are crooks” or “all Batswana are lazy.”

For centuries, the Christian West, following a Hebraic moral code that was, in any case, ambiguous, deluded itself with the belief that the only proper and “natural” use of the sexual instinct was for reproduction (God created men and women to be together and to have children). It was only recently that the churches finally had to accept that sexual pleasure could be an end in itself and an essential component of a loving relationship, at least in the case of married couples. But most Christian churches continue to insist that it is “unnatural”, “sinful”, or a “disorder” to experience the same pleasures and loving emotions with a person of the same sex.  Where does this illogical antagonism to homosexuality in the Judeo-Christian tradition originate? The evidence suggests that the prejudice emerged following the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity about seven centuries before the birth of Christ.

It looks as if the ancient Hebrews identified homosexuality with the Canaanites and rejected it along with other Canaanite customs in an effort to differentiate the emerging Jewish nation as completely as possible from Canaan.
Neither the Covenant Code nor Deuteronomy made homosexuality a crime nor until the time of King Josias 8 (640-609 BC),when male prostitutes, known as Kadesh, had a home in the wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, as well as in other holy places! Their function was fully integrated in the Jewish religion of the time (Kings 2: 28). It is not until Leviticus that one first discovers a Biblical interdiction against a man “lying with mankind as with womankind.”

The Jews attributed the introduction of sacramental sodomy in the Temple of Jerusalem to the Canaanites. It was a practice that extended from the time of the first Jewish kings until the reforms of Josias 8, which were designed to “purify” Jewish nationalism and justify the Jewish claim to the land of Canaan by purging the Jewish law of any supposedly Canaanite influences.  

Likewise, the famous episode of Sodom and Gomorrah – the central narrative in the Church’s condemnation of homosexuality – is in fact another story about nationalism. It is less about homosexuality than it is about differentiating the Jews from their neighbours and justifying the destruction of rival civilizations. Note that the virtuous Lot does not hesitate to offer up his two virgin daughters in order to save his guests from the lust of the Sodomites (Genesis 19: 8). The contempt for women was so great at that time that it was seen as holier to sacrifice the virginity of one’s daughters than compromise the honour of male guests. As Kinsey observes, homosexual activities had for long been associated with Jewish religious rites. The general condemnation of such activities did not come about until after the return from the Babylonian captivity, when a frightening new wave of nationalism inspired the Jews to purge any customs they thought they had assimilated from foreign peoples.

An obsession with nudity seems to have been fundamental to the development of Jewish taboos. As early as Genesis (9: 18-25), we find the story of Noah irrationally cursing his grandson Canaan after the boy’s father, Ham, accidentally sees the drunken Noah lying naked. In Leviticus (18: 6-19), there are no fewer than a dozen prohibitions concerning nudity alone. It is forbidden to see one’s father or mother naked, or one’s aunt, sister, grand-daughter, uncle, sister-in-law, brother, or any woman in a state of ritual impurity. Such anxiety about nakedness is obviously pathological, yet it is impossible to understand the Jewish sexual law without taking into account this underlying obsession with the shamefulness of the naked body.
The Judeo-Christian tradition has been profoundly neurotic about the body and its pleasures. Progressive Christians have struggled for many years to liberate themselves from these primitive taboos and to enable Christianity to become genuinely the religion of love that Christ intended, rather than a religion of shame and hate.

The taboo against homosexuality remains the most stubborn of these hangovers from a primitive past, and its persistence in Africa is especially tragic given the widespread tolerance of same-sex love in Africa before our mental and cultural colonization by Christianity. To sum up, my homosexual friends have clear consciences. They know that the earth is round; that they are all dusts of stars as well as daughters and sons of a Creator; that “the One is Multiple”; that “the One can be the Other”.  They and their friends love one another, enjoy flourishing private and professional lives, pay their taxes, practice their religions, love their countries, participate in charities and nation-building, in short do everything their heterosexual parents, siblings, children, and neighbours do. With one difference: they are unjustly denied the right to simply and openly be themselves!

The likes of Raditlhokwa are of course entitled to their narrow moral views and superstitious beliefs. The homosexuals are not asking to be liked by them or approved of. Thank God, they are immune to the Raditlhokwas. The homosexuals are asking them though to broaden their knowledge by reading what progressive thinkers – black and white, African and European – such as Achille Mbembe, Saint Thomas, Hegel, Rabbi Samuel Glasner, W D Hambly, Claude Levi-Strauss, D W Cory, Margarete Riemenscheider, and many others have to say on the subject.

Above all, they need to understand that Botswana is a democratic republic, not a theocracy. The religious life, like one’s sex life, is private. Let the homosexuals, just like anyone else, have a secular, tolerant citizenship in the public sphere, a committed, hopeful faith (of whatever kind) in their  homes and their places of worship, and a liberated, loving sexuality in the privacy of their bedrooms, free from the neurotic policing of those who think they have a right to enforce their personal moral beliefs on everyone else!