Dear Mr. Editor
Observing the town hall meeting on constitutional reform, last Thursday 7th October, the standout – and in fact only topic up for ‘debate’ – was same-sex marriage. It was therefore surprising when one of the speakers veered into pedophilia conspiracy theories, involving the establishment classes of England driven by “top cops, magistrates, judges and parliamentarians”. This is based on a conspiracy theory that found traction, last year, in the UK and was influenced by the ‘Q-Anon’ conspiracy theories in the US. These have been debunked as ‘conspiracy theories’. We should be mindful where we obtain our information from – and not put our trust in things just because they fit in with our agenda. The speaker was correct that pedophilia does occur in England but, unfortunately, it occurs in most societies, even Anguilla.
However, the point about pedophilia was made because the speaker was making a link between sexual abuse, at a young age, being one of the main causes of homosexuality and not that people were ‘born that way’. In fact there is some evidence to support this argument. A much quoted study in the US states that, ‘Anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant subset of children abused by clergy identify as gay as adults’ (Brady, 2008). Hailing from the “perverted” country of England, as the speaker referenced it as such, during his presentation, I know several people who are gay. They came from stable backgrounds, had not been abused as children, and they all have one thing in common – that they knew they were gay from early childhood at 4 or 5 years of age. This is not really the stage in life where people are thinking about ‘lifestyle choice’, which was another of the speaker’s arguments. Knowing how some people in Anguilla feel about homosexuality, why would anyone here choose to make that ‘lifestyle choice’ knowing they may be faced with a life of discrimination and derogatory remarks? This is not particularly an attractive proposition.
The Pastor argued that there was an agenda in England to increase the gay population from 2% to 10% or 20% (why there would be a motivation to do this was not explained) by “getting to the children” because “children are impressionable”. He also opined that teaching six year olds about same-sex relationships was “indoctrination”. This is sort of ironic because isn’t this just the same practice used to propagate religious belief?
Christianity is the major faith of choice here, but we heard time and again that marriage was in some way under the exclusive ownership of Christianity – and a Christian institution. The institution of marriage was around before Christianity was even thought of as a religion.
I am not gay, so banning same-sex marriage would not impact me directly – other than I would rather that we as a society did not discriminate against people based on who they love. Interestingly, we never seem to hear from the people who this ban would directly affect. We never hear their voices and I wonder why that is – I wonder why?
During the meeting, the Honourable Minister for Home Affairs shared that he and his fellow members of Government were of the opinion that same-sex marriage was a “no”, so it would appear that same-sex marriage has little chance of being part of the constitution. But aren’t Governments supposed to govern for all the people and promote equality by passing laws that are non-discriminatory? It would appear that on this matter it is a case of ‘Change Can Wait’.
Iain Bibby
