Can Parliament Impose Gay Marriage?

 

Kinisha Forbes and Kirsten Lettsome of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) are two brave women.  Anguilla seems to have none like them.  In 2011 they entered a civil partnership in the United Kingdom.  They were issued a marriage certificate once the UK’s same-sex couples law came into effect.  The couple are now back in the BVI.  They began a court action against the Attorney-General for a declaration that their marriage is valid under BVI law and that prohibiting same-sex marriage in the Territory is unconstitutional.

The BVI Christian Council applied to the Court to be added to the case as a third party so it could file briefs and argue against the claimants.  After initially allowing the Council to intervene, the judge has now struck them from the case, ruling that their application had no realistic prospect of success.  Besides, given the pressure on the court system in the BVI, it is important to make the best use of its resources.

The matter is complicated by two recent developments.  First, the Privy Council on 14 March 2022 in two appeals from Bermuda and the Cayman Islands ruled that the prohibitions on same-sex marriage in those two Territories were compliant with their Constitutions.  So, unless there is some major difference between the Constitutions of the BVI and those other two Territories, the precedents are against Ms Forbes and Ms Lettsome.

The second complication is the recent Private Member’s Bill laid in the House of Lords by Labour Party peer and gay-rights activist, Lord Michael Cashman.  The Bill seeks to make same-sex marriage lawful in all British Overseas Territories where it is currently unlawful.  That would include the BVI and Anguilla.

No one has asked for my opinion, but I am going to give it anyway.  The Privy Council has the power to pass any law it wishes for the Overseas Territories without being obliged to consult them.  However, all right-thinking Anguillians are opposed to the UK imposing domestic laws on the Overseas Territories without our express consent.  If we are really in a partnership for progress with the United Kingdom, such a unilateral step seems a little offensive.

If our Territories are backward in respecting human rights, someone among us needs to engage our people in a campaign of public information.  We must raise the levels of social consciousness and general education among our people.  It is our responsibility to encourage more liberal attitudes of live and let live.  It is not appropriate in the twenty-first century for Britain to dictate to us in this way, no matter how well-meaning the impulse was.

Additionally, it is for our gays and lesbians to agitate for their rights if they want them.  Freedom, democracy, and human rights cannot be taken for granted.  They must continually be fought for.  If our LGBTQ community came out of the closet and demanded equality, they would get it – albeit perhaps only after an almighty struggle.  If they prefer to keep silent, they will continue to be marginalised and discriminated against.

It is true that the UK has used legislation and Orders in Council in the past to amend our domestic law.  For example, within the last twenty-five years they decriminalised anal intercourse and abolished the death penalty in the Overseas Territories including Anguilla.  However, the difference there was that we asked them to do so.  They took this action at the request of our Heads of Government.  It was not unilaterally imposed on us.  The Minutes of the relevant Heads of Government meetings in London reveal that the Heads in effect told the FCO that they did not dare bring up these two reforms in their local parliaments.  The evangelicals and other extremists would raise a political storm.  It would create major problems if local politicians attempted to usher such Bills through the local Assemblies.

So, as a favour to, and at the request of, our Heads of Government, the FCO put the relevant Orders in Council before the Privy Council.  Once signed, anal intercourse became no longer a matter for the Criminal law, and the sentence of hanging was no longer available for a local court to impose.  There was no outcry from any of the Overseas Territories.  At our request, the Privy Council had intervened to assist us in two touchy matters we were afraid to address.

What is the source and origin of our backward attitude to gay marriage?  On what basis do the self-righteous among us fight so vehemently against our gay and lesbian brothers’ and sisters’ desire to have a normal family life?  The answer is that some of us in the British Overseas Territories are stuck in a time warp.  The barbaric moral rules of the Middle Eastern Bronze Age as adumbrated in the Old Testament Books are still taught in many of our third millennium churches and schools as God’s sacred word.  In many of our infant schools, “creationism” is taught instead of evolution of species.  Instead of elementary geology, our primary schools teach that God created the earth on 23 October, 4004 BCE.  At odd times during the day, our ears are assaulted on the airwaves by religious extremists preaching that Sodom and Gomorrah are about to rain down on us.

An apt response to these fanatics of the airwaves comes to mind.  It is an old one, but a good one.  It is worthy of repetition.  A reminder may even help to bring home that it is nonsense they are preaching:

Dear Evangelical Association,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law.  I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can.  When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination.  End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev 1:9).  The problem is my neighbours.  They claim the odour is not pleasing to them.  Should I smite them?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7.  In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24).  The problem is, how do I tell?  I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations.  A friend of mine claims that this applies to Kittitians but not St Martiners.  Can you clarify?  Why can’t I own a St Martiner?

I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath.  Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death.  Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating lobster is an abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality.  I don’t agree.  Can you settle this?

Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight.  I have to admit that I wear reading glasses.  Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27.  How should they die?

I know from Lev 11:8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

My uncle has a farm.  He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend).  He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot.  Is it really necessary that we go to the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:16).  Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Our problem in Anguilla is that we jumped from the childish credulity of worshiping Bronze Age barbaric gods of circa 1350 BCE, revitalised by the Gospels and the Koran, into the electronic and digital age without having stopped off at the Enlightenment Period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The enlightened among us must confront religious extremists whenever they stick their faces above the parapet.  We must oppose their twisted rantings for the sake of the mental health of our children and grandchildren, if for nothing else. 

The barbaric knifing of Salman Rushdie in New York at the command of the late Afghan Ayatollah is not peculiarly Muslim behaviour.  Christians among us in earlier centuries behaved in the same murderous way.  During the Reformation period in Europe (1500 to 1700 approximately), Catholics murdered millions of Protestants while Protestants murdered millions of Catholics in retaliation.  In the same way, for centuries the Sunni majority militants murdered Shia minority Muslims.

Most of us who were brought up Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist, have culturally evolved away from such madness.  Only Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostalists, and Suni Muslims are left today to wallow in ancient, murderous, religion-inspired hatreds.

Gender Studies

 

Gender studies is a perfectly respectable area of social study in academia, first coming to prominence in West Indian intellectual circles in the 1970s and 1980s and continuing.  It approaches our deep-rooted gender inequalities in the Caribbean demonstrated, for example, in the types of jobs women are in.  It studies and explains sexism, racism, classism, and other systemic inequalities.  It attempts to explain the irony of the patriarchy coexisting within a system of matriarchal families, and our long tradition of female economic autonomy.

Distinguished Caribbean academics such as Christine Barrow, Edith Clarke, Keith Hart, Donna P Hope, Patricia Mohammed, Rhoda Reddock, Olive Senior, Catherine Shepherd, Raymond Smith, and Kevin Yelvington, to mention a few, have researched how sexual orientation and gender in the West Indies are conceived, studied, discussed, and experienced.

There are hundreds of books and dozens of academic journal articles on the subject.  “The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies”, is a highly thought of journal of the University of the West Indies, focusing on publishing research on gender studies.

Perhaps the most threatening area of all this research has been the study of how dominant masculinity has persisted and resisted the extending of civil rights to women.  The patriarchy is not happy with gender studies.

The result in recent years has been a public onslaught on the so-called “gender ideology”.  These attacks are backed by extremist Christian and Muslim clerics and organisations.  The one thing these groups agree on is that the traditional family is under attack.  They believe children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.

Evangelicals and other fundamentalists make such incendiary claims to defeat what they see as “gender ideology” or “gender studies”.  They object to “gender” because it is said to deny biological sex, and it undermines the natural or divine character of the traditional family.  They fear that, if we start thinking along gender lines, men will lose their dominant positions.  They believe that children are being told to change genders.  They preach that our children are actively being recruited by gay and trans people, and our boys and girls are being pressured to declare themselves as gay in educational settings where an open discourse about gender is caricatured as a form of indoctrination.

These extremists worry that if something called “gender” is socially accepted, a flood of sexual perversions, including bestiality and paedophilia, will be unleashed upon the earth.  Anyone who listened to or participated in the Constitutional Reform Town Hall Meetings held in Anguilla over the past several weeks, will recognise this language.  It captures the rhetoric and the reasoning used by the Christian fundamentalists who addressed the meetings.  Our Christian fundamentalists make the outlandish demand that any new Constitution must contain a clause confirming that the only marriage that will ever be recognised in Anguilla is one between a man and a woman.

The principal aim of this woman-hating and homophobic movement is to oppose progressive legislation won in the last decades by the gay, lesbian and feminist movements all over the world.  In attacking “gender” they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents.  They oppose protection for women against rape and domestic violence.  They deny the legal and social rights of homosexuals.  They oppose legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination.  They support conversion therapy, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment, the killing of gays, and the criminalisation of abortion.

It is easy enough to debunk and even ridicule many of the claims that are made against gender studies or gender identity, since they are based on thin caricatures.  The truth is there is no single concept of gender.  Gender studies is a complex and internally diverse field that includes a wide range of scholars.  It does not deny sex, nor does it threaten any unbigoted male.  It tends to ask how sex is established, through what medical and legal frameworks.  It explains how our understanding of sex has changed through time.  It examines what difference it makes to the social organization of our world to disconnect the sex assigned at birth from the life that follows, including matters of work and love.

We generally think of sex assignment as happening once.  But what if it is a complex and revisable process, reversible in time for those who have been wrongly assigned?  To argue this way is not to take a position against science, but only to ask how science and law enter the social regulation of identity.  “But there are two sexes!”  Generally, yes, but even the ideals of two distinct forms of male and female that govern our everyday conceptions of sex are in many ways disputed by science.  Research has shown how vexed and consequential sex assignment can be.

Fundamentalists and extremists claim that the very concept of “gender” is an attack on Christianity or traditional Islam.  They accuse those who discuss “gender” of discriminating against their religious beliefs.  And yet, it is evident that the enemies of freedom do not come from the outside.  Acceptance of blind dogma is to be found on the side of the would-be censors.

Opponents of “gender” seek recourse in the Bible and Koran to defend their views about the natural hierarchy between men and women.  They push the distinctive values of masculine and feminine (although progressive theologians have pointed out that these are based on debatable readings of the early texts).  They claim that assigned sex is divinely declared, suggesting that contemporary biologists and medical doctors are curiously in the service of 13th-century theology.

Chromosomal and endocrinological differences complicate the binarism of sex.  The evidence is that sex assignment is sometimes revisable.  The anti-gender advocates wrongfully claim that “gender ideologists” deny the material differences between men and women.

The anti-gender movement is not a conservative position with a clear set of principles.  It is a fascist trend.  It mobilizes a range of rhetorical strategies from across the political spectrum to maximize the fear of infiltration and destruction that comes from a diverse set of economic and social forces.  It does not strive for consistency, for its incoherence is part of its power.

It is depressing to see that there are even a few women who have joined this homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-liberal movement.  No freedom loving Anguillian should be opposed to gays and lesbians having the same marriage rights as we heterosexuals.  Thankfully, there is hope in the coming generation of leaders.  They generally do not subscribe to two-thousand-year-old views on sex and gender.  As always, the youth are the future.[1]

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[1]     With thanks to an article by Judith Butler, visiting distinguished professor of philosophy at the New School University in New York, and published in the Guardian Newspaper of 23 October 2021, the source of much of this article:  (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideology-backlash).