Guest Writer
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| By Dan Agbese |
ON the eve of President Muhammed Buhari’s departure for the US July 19 for his first meeting with President Barack Obama, some Nigerians were genuinely worried that the meeting might produce a nod for gay marriage in our country. Some anti-gay young men and women in Lagos organised a rather scrappy protest with placards. I think it is a huge relief that the issue came up at the meeting between the two leaders but Buhari made it clear he would not countenance gay marriage. He told the American leader it was abhorrent to our culture and that the anti-gay marriage law had firmly locked the barn against it.
Has it? I am willing to bet that we have not heard the last word on gay marriage in our country. It would be naïve to think that the anti-gay marriage law would not be challenged in the future and perhaps ultimately find itself in the waste paper basket.
My prediction is that gay marriage would be legit here sooner than you might think. Blame the wind of change for the steady but creepy march of gay rights through out the world. The march is now unstoppable. The US Supreme Court ruling is the judicial imprimatur that Western nations need to fall in line with the Americans.
Gay rights have made tremendous progress in the last twenty or twenty-five years. Twenty years or so ago, gays and lesbians were all in the closet, ashamed to let even their friends and families know that they were sexual deviants. No one talked of their rights, at least not in civilized societies. But see how fast their luck has changed. They are all out of the closets now and are proud to march in parades on US and European countries in support of their right to be gay and to be so recognised in law and in practice.
Their argument is that their sexual preferences are personal rights that qualify as fundamental human rights. They do not blame themselves for their sexual perversion now laundered and called sexual orientation. They blame God. The old man made them so.
A few years ago, those who now feel offended by the gay rights march were prepared to accept that what men and women did in the privacy of their bedrooms was no one else’s concern. But here we are. They have moved from the bedrooms to the market place. The worry lines are appearing on our faces. It always happens when you realise you cannot put the genii back in the bottle.
Gays and lesbians claim legal and social rights to be treated in every respect like heterosexuals. They achieved their objective through a steady and relentless chipping away at the granites of our moral stand and vigilance. Some states in the US vehemently disagree with the Supreme Court ruling. They are not prepared to permit gay marriages. But they do know they are knocking their heads against the wall. Spare some thoughts for the states in the Bible belt. Their moral torch is flickering in the darkening tunnel of sexual depravity.
It no longer matters that some of us are disgusted by everything these sexual perverts stand for. Men sleeping with men and women sleeping with women cannot be the natural order of things. Every culture abhors it but the closets are full of gays and lesbians in countries that are harsh on them. Such countries are holding out in the obvious belief that the ramparts of their culture and morality would withstand the howling wind of change in the mores and the morals of sexual uprightness. They are mistaken, and grievously so.
And make no mistake. The West drives this wind of change. Once it accepted that gay rights are fundamental human rights, it rose to protect them and extend their frontiers, pulling in all nations. I knew that once the West accepted that a man’s or a woman’s sexual orientation is a personal choice and qualifies within the ambits of human rights to be so recognised gays and lesbians had won their battle.
It should not be difficult to imagine what the state of human societies would be 20 to 30 years from now. There would be a steady decline in human populations. Labour wards would be empty. We would lose what was once regarded as the most important achievement of the human race – heterosexual marriage and the raising of families.
But not to worry; there is always a way out of sticky points in human societies. As I see it, the future of the human race and its survival in the form we know it today, would rest in the hands of primitive societies in the villages of Africa and Asia. They would continue to populate the earth, deaf to the howling wind of change that has swept gays and lesbians to the centre stage. I am sure the human society would survive its latest challenge to its own survival. But it is important for us to accept African and Asian villages hold he key to that survival. African and Asian village men and women would continue to make babies and carry on the divine injunction to fill the earth. It should make God smile.
— Aug 3, 2015 @ 01:00 GMT
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Tags: anti-gay Barack Obama gay marriage gay rights gays heterosexuals Human Rights lesbians march marriage Muhammed Buhari placards Protest sexual depravity sexual perversion US Supreme Court
