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Letter of the Day | Don't trespass on gays' right to intimacy

Published:Tuesday | May 15, 2018 | 12:00 AM

THE EDITOR, Sir:

Regarding Peter Espeut's challenge ('Fake news and the gay agenda', May 4, 2018), I'm a Jamaican, a Roman Catholic, and happily married to a woman for 45 years.

While I agree that one's constitutional right to equality before the law is the principle on which each human being is subject to the same law, surely the LGBTQI argument is that the buggery law is unjust and, therefore, a bad law, and that they, therefore, reserve the right to actively lobby for its change.

As a sociologist, Rev Espeut should give some credence to the argument that in the 21st century and within a democratic society, the right of each adult to personal intimacy with another consenting adult is, or should be, a human right on which adult sexual activities and responsibilities are based.

Denying LGBTQI that right to which they are entitled can too easily be seen as trying to dictate what consenting adults should do when being intimate within the confines of their bedrooms. What is the real obfuscation is his notion of "all types of sex" - say, like what 85-year-olds do as opposed to 18-year-olds.

Of far more importance, however, is the need for a genuine morally based principle that sits alongside the recognition of our human environmental obligations to Mother Earth, and the real effects of irresponsibly transgressing this. One that spells out, for example, that marriage between one man and a woman (for all the physical, psychological, sociological and cultural complementarities this offers) is ultimately in the interest of a version of philanthropy that is inextricably linked to the real opposite of homophobia.

For, as with the LGBTQI in Britain and increasingly elsewhere, the right to intimacy is far from the real political endgame of the gay activists' lobby. For neither a mere change in the law nor the making of civil partnerships legal and therefore having 'sex, however you want it' is what's being pursued.

No, using, as they did, the arguments of the victims of racism and of the need for equality are but means to an end - an end involving far more radical changes in which 'truths' and qualitative differences matter not; in which we can 'big up ourselves' to seem what we are not, and make 'individualism' seemingly supreme.

By being so mesmerisingly focused on 'intimacy', the lines about straining gnats and swallowing camels come to mind.

BASIL HYLTON

outreachjp@gmail.com