So What is wrong with Same-Sex Marriage?

Several years ago, I wrote an article entitled Homosexuality and African Discontents. Since the article was published on a website visited by many Nigerians, the responses to the two-part piece were swift and severally scathing. How dare I question the ironclad morality of Africans, morality unsullied by homosexuality and bisexuality?

One of the snider responses was that which implied that I had written such an impassioned piece because it was likely that I was a closeted gay person who was thinking of coming out. The commenter promised a rain of brimstone and sulphur on me and others of my ‘ilk.’ I found it rather funny that the anti-gay fulminator presumed that because I wrote an article about the hypocrisy which inheres in Africans’ attitude to homosexuality and homosexuals, then I must necessarily be gay.

But then what motivated me to write the article was what would also have motivated me to write articles in defence of oppressed women, abused children, racially abused blacks or whites, victimised heterosexuals or homosexuals, or any man or woman whose human rights are curtailed in any way – and I would, in the same vein, not condone cruelty to animals.     

This is why I believe a gay couple have the right to call themselves ‘married’ if that is what they want. President Barack Obama’s declaration of support for same-sex marriage has caused some debate in the US. But for a man who wishes to run for office again in November, that was a courageous - some would say impolitic - pronouncement. From all appearances, America has a sizable population of bible-wielding wingnuts to whom homosexuality is the most infernal sin anyone can commit. But then whether or not Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage, this kind of moral ‘standpatters’ would rather burn in their imagined hell than vote for him.

And it is not as if Obama has done anything exceedingly daring in supporting - in principle - same-sex marriage. Unsurprisingly, countries like Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands have one form of same-sex union or the other. Marriage between same-sex couples has also been statutorily recognised in Spain and Portugal despite the Catholicism of their people. In South Africa, a legal loophole was used to legitimise same-sex marriage.

Remarkably enough, South Africa has such a top religious leader as Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a vocal champion of the rights of gay people. However, one of the fiercest critics of the British conservative Prime Minister’s wish to regularise same-sex unions is the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York. John Sentamu’s behaviour is only slightly better than that of his African episcopal brothers, who insist, wrong-mindedly and ignorantly, that homosexuality is un-African. One is not surprised that countries like Uganda and Nigeria have passed some of the most draconian laws against homosexuality. In 2006, the Nigerian government interdicted gay unions of any sort and forbade anyone from conducting same-sex marriage ceremonies, a law that was premised on the Africa-does-not-do-gay fallacy.

So what is wrong with same-sex marriage? Nothing, absolutely nothing. I am not religious, and if I were religious, the likelihood is that my attitude to gay rights would be akin to that of Archbishop Tutu - or that of a young man I met in Nigeria recently who, though married with kids and an evangelical Christian, thought homosexuals should be left alone to live their lives. But I am not religious; I am contented with my impiety and not being enslaved by dogma and creed and the ceaseless rereading of the 'Good Book' or any of its variants.  

As for the bible, I do not see why I should be using injunctions in a book written several thousand years ago as a guide to morality in the 21^st century (of course, it might help as a guide for living to some people, but it is not, and cannot, be that for me). There is a limit to what one is going to take from the prescriptive passages of a book written by men who knew nothing about DNA, genes, evolutionary biology and psychology, gender dysmorphia, androgyny, men to whom the mere study of sexology would equate ante-destruction Sodom and Gomorrah, fear-ridden ancients whose knowledge was no larger than the world they knew those thousands of years ago.

If I can walk into a registry and tell the registrar that I would like to wed a woman I just came in within that civic space, what right have I got to say to any man, for instance, that he has no warrant to do exactly what I am doing just because he has come in with another man? I have no such right, nor does any Christian, Muslim, or Jewish fundie, or any kind of moral monomaniac who thinks his possibly complicated heterosexual life should be the lodestar for everyone. So far as a lot of religious moralists are concerned, the heterosexual cake is the only one that can be held and eaten at the same time - and savoured. This should not be so.

Someone once asked me how I would feel if I had a gay couple living next door to me - and my children. The import was not that the gay couple might be paedophiles, but that what would I tell the children if they asked what the women or men were to each other? This was an unnecessary question because, curious as children are, they would not see anything wrong with two women living in a house. Even if they asked, I cannot see why I would have to tell them the women were involved in any kind of deeper way than being friends, any more than I would need to explain to them what the heterosexual couple on the other side were up to in their bedroom.

Living next door to a gay couple would ultimately make no difference to the sexuality of my children - what they are and would hinge on evolutionary determinism rather than such a random and arbitrary matter of living next door to a straight or gay couple or being born in the UK or Nigeria, or being black or white. Conjuring up such a scenario of gay contagion was an abject instance of misleading vividness, a kind of question-begging which should only invite scorn. Apart from the citing of religious proscription, this is one of the emotional arguments that are dragged up to taboo same-sex relations.  

And we mustn’t forget that there was a time when some white people would consider it unthinkable to live in the same street as black families. There was also a time in today’s Western world when women were seen as infinitely inferior subhumans, good only for the kitchen and the bed. Women in most countries of Africa are still seen that way, and just as it is being used in the oppression of gay people, mouldy religionism is also helping in the suppression of women.  

Speaking about repression, Africa is still in its pre-Freudian stage in the matter of open discussion of sex and sexuality. However, this wilful obscurantism does not necessarily translate into continental chastity - no pun - it does not mean that every African holds the straight-and-narrow missionary position in the matter of sexuality. So despite institutional furtiveness about this most important aspect of human existence, despite the facade of puritanism, Africans will discover one day that, inevitably, they need to discuss and confront issues like homosexuality, transvestism, even same-sex marriage.      

        

  

Man and God: A Conversation.

Man: Who is there?

Voice: It’s me, God.

Man: God? You must be kidding me. The guy people call God does not just walk into one’s room just like that. Whoever you are, get out of that alcove there. Let me see you clearly. You know I can’t walk. If you are a thief, come round in and steal whatever you want to steal, not that there is much to take here. I have nothing. I am a poor cripple (I have to use the awful word, it describes my state better).

Voice: Although I may have come like a thief in the night, I am genuinely God.

Man: Jesus then. I think it was Jesus who said he would come like a thief or something…

Voice: Hey, I am God!                

Man: Jesus’ Dad?

Voice: Look man, do not be flippant. Or I’ll strike you dead where you are! 
Man: Whoever you are, don’t you know that thing about hitting a man when he is down? That’s cowardly, I think. And if you are truly God, could you tell me what’s wrong in calling you Jesus’ dad? Or are you not that, God? I mean if you are the Christian god?

Voice: There is no such thing as a Christian god, I am the God of every religion.

Man: Even the god of Buddhism.

Voice: That too.

Man: But I understand Buddhism does not have anything like a god – I mean like the god of Christians. Anyway, I indeed think you sound like God. Such overarching confidence and ambition. So Lord God, what is it you want from me now? It’s not as if I just prayed to you or anything… I haven’t said a prayer since I left Sunday school fifty years ago.

Voice: It does not matter. You’re a prodigal son, a lost sheep, you will be brought back to the flock.

Man:  The flock? Me, a sheep? When did I lose the gift of baaing? But why am I even falling for this? God hiding behind my window and talking to me, telling me I am a sheep. I am not even Moses, or anyone like that, you know the Burning Bush and the whole Moses-climbing-the-mountain-to-get-the-ten-commandments shtick. Or am I… schizoid or something?

Voice: I do not need to prove to you that I am God. I am who I am.

Man: Wow! I really feel like laughing now. But this is not even funny. Now God what do you want from me, to cripple me more? I know you are capable of that, of such cruelty.

Voice: No. I have only come to ask you why you did – and still do – not believe in me. Even when I made you drunk and let you crash your car against a tree. I wanted to kill you outright then, so that you would be delivered to hell post-haste. But somehow you survived, and I said to myself: Fine, if he survives I may still have the chance to talk to him.

Man: Are you really certain you are god? Or am I dreaming, hallucinating? God should be able to do a simple thing like killing with certainty, not maiming. I mean if you really meant to kill me, why didn't you just do it. And then you made me drunk first.

Voice: No, I said that in error, that I made you drunk. I actually didn’t get you intoxicated. You became drunk by choice, you exercised your freewill in that way.

Man: Ah, freewill. I don’t want to go into that now. Or else God may find himself on a slippery slope, and who knows what will be at the bottom of the hill? And you have not told me what you want with me now.

Voice: I only want to tell you that you have a short time to live, I want to give you a last chance of repentance. Because you are certain to lose out when you die, when you discover that I am who I am. Remember Pascal’s wager?

Man: I’d rather lose the bet that I didn’t really take than believe that when I die I am going to meet a fairy godfather who has not exactly been a great benefactor to me - or to the majority of those who adopt him as their godfather. If you are that god or godfather that I may meet up there or wherever you are, I say it loud and clear now: Fuck you. 
Voice: You’re a stubborn twerp, a pigheaded fool. Okay let me give you a last chance of repentance. Run all the sins you have committed through your mind. Remember your many adulteries. You slept with the wives of two of your friends. Remember all your fornications, before and after you got married to that poor woman, remember the Jezebel woman you copulated with...

Man: Aren’t you too obsessed with sex, God? I seem to remember how your beloved, your chosen one, King David, slept with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah whom he killed. There was also Abishag the Shunamite, David’s companion in old age. And what’s that about Jezebel? Last time I checked, Jezebel was the wife of someone in your bible...Oh I remember, I met this foxy lady in a whorehouse in Antwerp, she called herself Jezebel. And there was one called Abishag for obvious reasons. By the way, I suspect you don’t really like women, they seem not to count for much. And God, in spite of all my ‘sins,’ I didn’t kill any woman’s husband, I only copulated with their wives. Ah, copulate, I like that word. Co-pu-late.

Voice: Now enough of this nonsense. I should finish the job I have come to do now.   

Man: Oh, job. What a job, killing people? And truly, enough farting around now, God or whatever your name is. Can you get yourself out of this room? I need to sleep. Get your ass out of here, in the shape of ectoplasm or whichever manner you wormed into this place. Really, if I could walk I would come round there and thwack your big godly head – it will be big, I believe, your head.

Voice: Then you would be thwacking your own head. It’s strange you cannot recognise your own voice.

Man: Pardon me?

The voice in the shadow materialises, incarnates. If the bedridden man hasn’t been always been of a strong heart, in spite of his disability, he would have had a fatal shock. But he can only watch with consternation as a figure emerges from behind the curtains. The image comes out into the lit room and quickly turns out to be the exact copy, albeit ambulant, of the man on the bed, not just an identical twin - he does not have a twin - it is himself. And the ‘cripple’ can’t remember ever being cloned. He blinks several times to see whether there is truly something, someone - it is his doppelganger all right, he can see. It approaches him smiling, reaching out his hand towards him.

‘You nearly swallowed the codswallop, didn’t you, that I was God?’

   

Behold Africa’s New Messiah (Pastor TB Joshua)!

More than twenty years ago I not only ‘predicted’ that evangelical churches would become a locust-like pestilence and blight on Nigeria’s (and Africa’s) landscape, I also ‘prophesied’ that such a profusion of churches and cognate religious entities would set the country (and continent) back by hundreds of years. Nigeria and Africa are living down both ‘predictions’ today. By the way, the first was neither a prediction nor the other a prophecy, both were mere deductive guesswork - and a little knowledge of the laws of probability had also helped.

  At the time I was doing this secular soothsaying, a churchman called Primate Olabayo was also flourishing in Nigeria, doing pretty much the same thing that I did, foretelling things, although now in a religious-industrial scale and with a cocksureness that religious leaders often evince. Years after he had become a big-time forecaster of events, the man ‘predicted’ the victory of George Bush the second in the American presidential election, something that a lot of intelligent political analysts and observers were also able to see. And though I think I read somewhere that Olabayo foretold the death of a sickly Yar Adua a couple of years ago, he seems to have yielded the pre-eminent position of ‘Abrahamic Oracle’ to another man.

  Pastor TB Joshua, founder of Synagogue Church in Nigeria. Before now I had shown little or no interest in the man because I thought he was as much a smartass showman as any Nigerian pastor or primate (what juxtaposition! Fancy this as a title of a book, Of Pastors and Primates). But I was well aware that TB Joshua had stature, religious stature. For some reason, people believe he can heal the sick, resuscitate any limp limb, make the blind see, even cure cancer and AIDS. Since no conclusive proof has ever been provided for these deeds, I refuse to believe that the guy is doing anything more than sheer monkey business and hokey-pokey, I believe he is only carrying out elaborate eyewash rather than miraculously restoring sight to the blind.

  I was also well aware of the altercation that Joshua had with other Nigerian pastors a few years ago, something which recalls the territorial skirmishes between ostensibly mojoed masqueraders when I was a boy growing up in semi-rural Nigeria, an ego-fed tussle for shamanic superiority.

   I also recall how the incumbent Ghanaian president Professor Atta Mills came to pay obeisance to TB Joshua because the Synagogue man foreordained his winning of the Ghanaian presidential election. I was ever so slightly surprised when I read this because I thought someone whose name had the tag ‘professor' should know better than coming round from his country to anoint the foot of a man who predicted he would be king. I wonder whether the pastor, who has variously been accused of sorcery, was able to foresee any Macbethal sting in the tail of the Ghanaian presidential good tidings.

  In the grip of immodest self-aggrandisement, an attitude which is not alien to top churchmen and women, TB Joshua posted on Youtube the prediction he made of the death of the 78 year old Malawian president. Although the pastor did not explicitly say Mr Mutharika was going to die, in his trademark oracular style, he said something about an African president dying, an African president who was not from West Africa. So when the Malawian president died, it was bull’s-eye for TB Joshua. And there was the chorus of hosanna: ‘oh, the man has done it again, he predicted the death of someone.’

  The supporters of the late president were no less believing than others that Joshua foresaw the death of their leader, they even accused him of casting a spell on the late president and machinating his death, so that the vice-president, Joyce Banda, who attends his church would be president. Mr William Shakespeare, where art thou?  

  Anyway, as a consequence of this vicarious death-wish waffle, Morgan Tsangerai, the now irrelevant Zimbabwean prime minister, invited Joshua to Zimbabwe’s Day of National Prayer. Although I am no longer surprised to see or hear anything Africa throws up in the way of religion and mumbo-jumbo in general, I was nevertheless stumped that a country so battered like Zimbabwe still had the time to orchestrate a day national of prayers. But then what else would a sub-Saharan African country in straitened circumstances do if not organise such a brainless barbarism as a day of prayer and fasting, and then invite a celebrated, wonder-working African pastor who makes pythonic utterances?

  As in Malawi, there is some controversy in Zimbabwe. A group of Zimbabwean church leaders declared a few days ago that they do not want to see TB Joshua in Zimbabwe’s National Prayer Arena. Why? Because, according to the churchfolk, Joshua’s teachings are ‘judgemental and unorthodox,’ and they also asked how the ‘prediction of the death of Michael Jackson helped the children of God?’

  If you believed that there was anything like ‘children of God,’ you would give some credit to the Zimbabwean pastors’ objections. But then one of them had also said, ‘God is particularly not interested in the outcomes of football matches,’ which Joshua often also predicts. If God is not interested in the outcome of football matches, one wonders why footballers waste their time praying to him before they start running after and kicking the ball, and why the same God had saved the life of a footballer (a la Patrice Muamba)!

 And the Zimbabwe’s pastors had also unconsciously used the argumentative pitfall of ‘selective reasoning’ to destroy the theory of an omniscient and omnipotent God who is interested in everything. Because if God does not want to know anything about football matches, he would not - a fortiori - be interested in Zimbabwe, because there is no proof that the space called Zimbabwe is of any significance than any square of turf where football is played. Anyway, this is no time or place for theologising - or logic-chopping.

  Although they know what my answer will be, people have asked me whether I believe TB Joshua is a true faith-healer or a real soothsayer. Now while I am not directly privy to Joshua’s bag of tricks, I can say with some certainty that what the man does is no holier than what the British magician, illusionist, mentalist, sceptic and atheist, Derren Brown, does on TV, the only difference is that TB Joshua makes a religious circus out of his own show. Brown takes his time to tell viewers that what he does is nothing but trickery, mental juggling, entertainment and deception. In his 2005 show, Messiah, he seeks to out-Jesus Jesus in the act of faith-healing and miracle-working.

  While unbelieving Derren Brown is doing everything for show and money, TB Joshua - doing pretty much the same thing - is being lionised in Africa. Even messianised - the new Jesus of Africa - after all, Jesus’s putative original name was Joshua (Yeshua or Yehoshua). Just as I don’t see any need for any high day of prayer in any country, less so in technology-starved African countries, I do not see how TB Joshua is relevant to the continent’s wellbeing and development.

   Let us hypothesise and say Joshua’s miracles and predictions are genuine. But what has that got to do with anything? And if he goes to Zimbabwe’s prayer-fest, is he going to openly pray for the demise of Robert Mugabe, the Hitler-moustached geriatric who has trashed his country over the last 30 years? If he does that and Mugabe drops dead the next day like a kind of suddenly-stricken Herod, then I may give TB Joshua a smidgen of the benefit of the doubt.

   But no, I won’t. Mugabe, like every animate being, can die at any time, any day or any hour. As a matter of fact, I have always argued that it is proof that there is no such thing as a fair god if the bespectacled old crock that is Mugabe still waddles around, dye-headed, while holding his people in the state of serfhood.  

On the Suffering of the World: Arthur Schopenhauer

                                                                 

                                                                 

Recently when I put up the picture of a grizzled elderly geezer on my Facebook page, some may have correctly guessed that the man was not my great-great-great-grandfather. I did not put the picture there for any fanciful Facebook posturing that needed a twee caption to achieve maximum effect, it was uploaded for my own personal diversion - in the same way a teenybopper would put a poster of Justin Bieber on the wall of her room.
     The man in the painting is indeed my ancestor. Now look at our heads - although his balding pate is bordered by coiffed puffs of hair, we are both thin on top. Arthur Schopenhauer is my philosophical ancestor, apologies to Harold Bloom who proposed the concept of ‘literary ancestors.’ Like Friedrich Nietzsche, his fellow countryman, Schopenhauer straddles both the ‘lunatic fringe’ and the ‘mainstream’ of philosophy - both men are iconoclasts, they share a penchant for grand expressive appeal and sheer intellectual gall. But for me Schopenhauer’s appeal - in certain ways - is grander than Nietzsche’s.    

     Which was why I returned to a collection of his writings a few days ago while browsing through the double-cased miscellany that Penguin Books calls Great Ideas. The collection comprises 40 slimline books and parades stellar works by Plato, Darwin and Freud and 37 others. When I lit on Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World, I could not but reread the essay - the umpteenth time - and the one that comes after it, On the Vanity of Existence.

      It is not possible to expand to a great degree on Schopenhauer’s complex and quietly yeasty life here - a vignette will do. And for the purpose of immediacy, I would like to relocate the philosopher in historical present. Arthur Schopenhauer is a lifelong bachelor, a lone wolf who does not try to hide his wolfhood, he yaps, snarls, growls. Although he goes out of his way to love a woman for some time, well enough to think of marrying her, the plan falls through. Whereupon Schopenhauer decides to live with a relay of dogs, he becomes a canophilist (dog-fancier), writing philosophy and, in his aloneness, escaping further into what the Neoplatonist thinker, Plotinus, describes as ‘the alone.’

     Schopenhauer is a pessimist, a misanthrope, a miserabilist, the patron saint of grumpy middle-aged men. Although I am now on the cusp of youth and middle-age, I discovered Schopenhauer long ago, as a hypercurious adolescent quester after truths. I knew even then that Schopenhauer was the real deal, although a less determined young reader would have chucked out the philosopher’s book that I found then. The book was The World as Will and Representation, by no means an impenetrable book, as philosophy goes, but then moving from reading penny-dreadfuls like James Hadley Chase to anything serious was bound to be tricky. The influential essay, On the Suffering of the World, came later.

     There is something else: Schopenhauer is a misogynist, his views about women are uncharitable, every so often scurrilous. This is unfortunate, though - to borrow from psychoanalysis, a theory inaugurated by one of those he influenced - one might connect the contempt in which Schopenhauer holds women with the difficult relation he had with his mother. He sees women as no more than outsized children. He scorns, ‘Women remain children all their lives, they never see anything but what is closest to them, cleave to the present moment.’

     Certainly, my disposition towards women, towards the female gender in general, is diametrically opposed to Schopenhauer’s. I remember how, as an impressionable youth, I resurrected the dated phrase ‘New Man’ to describe what I intended to become - a man who preaches and practises equality of the sexes. When Schopenhauer was at the age I was, his gynophobia was well-nigh calcified. And his boorishness, his tetchiness, and his inability to humanise himself before anyone he came in contact with - an attitude which is again in opposition to my own.

     So why do I see him as a philosophical ancestor? The nub of his worldview, cheerless and bleak as it may seem, rings true and resonantly to me. Schopenhauer believes that a continuum of pain, suffering, hurt and boredom is the lot of humankind, that there is no way anyone can escape it, and that states like happiness and pleasure are default stopgaps. ‘Existence is typified by unrest,’ he says. And continues: ‘for the world is Hell, and men (and women) are the tormented souls...’ He cannot comprehend why ‘a god like Jehovah should create this world of want and misery... and then go so far as to applaud himself for it, saying all is very good.’

     Of course before Schopenhauer, Voltaire had used the character Dr Pangloss in Candide to lampoon Leibnitz’s declaration that this (world) is the best of all possible worlds. What atheist Schopenhauer does better than deist Voltaire is to grab you by scruff of your neck and tell you in his pissed-off way that this (world) is as awful and dire a world as any you can find. In On the Vanity of Existence, Schopenhauer drives a monster coach and horses through the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, he refuses to strike any balance between such extremes as ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure.’ So far as he is concerned, if all is vanity, then all is unrelievedly vanity - there is no playful dingdong like it is in the bible’s book. Although I lost my Panglossian - unreasonable optimism - side decades ago, I am not sure I am as deep-dyed a dismalist as Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer suggests that the only way to alleviate the suffering of human existence is through the arts: music, fine art and literature, with music having more tonicity - although he is doubtful whether it would provide any life-long elixir.

     Apropos of the arts and their pursuit, a visit to Fela Kuti’s Afrika Shrine in the early 1990s had put me in mind of Schopenhauer (and Freud). When he was bantering between spurts of Afrobeating, Fela had said something which Schopenhauer would have wholeheartedly agreed with. The musical genius declared that adult humans should reconsider the normal address of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman,’ it is better, he declared, to be truthful and say ‘Penis’ and ‘Vagina’ since that is what a lot of adults think about when they meet other. Of course, Fela’s attempt to annul Freudian superego might be impossible, even perverse, but there is some truth in the jokey proposition.

    Like Fela, Schopenhauer believes that sex is as important in humans’ wretched lives as food, that it is a nutriment of sorts, he opines that one should have as much of it as one can manage, although expectedly, he sours this up by saying that sexual gratification is no more than a source of ‘brief pleasure and protracted suffering.’ Even then he likes sex well enough to father an illegitimate child who dies early, thus seating Schopenhauer prettier in his antinatalist - better-never-to-have-been-born - comfort corner.

    Fela’s seemingly salacious utterance also recalls Schopenhauer’s view that ‘the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not Monsieur, Sir, but Fellow Sufferer.’ While I would not address anyone as Fellow Sufferer, I remain inexorably tough-minded about the human condition - unlike religionists, I refuse to sugarcoat its overwhelmingly thorny aspects. To the best of my ability, I use art - reading, writing, fine art, music - for the purpose Schopenhauer suggests it should be used, as balm.

     Which is perhaps why only a few would dismiss me as a grouch or a cur. And which is where Schopenhauer major flaw lies - he lives all of his long life in a state of pickled curmudgeonliness.     

  

Lord of the Ants

I am still winning against the tiny red  

Ants marching into my cocoa mug,     

They’ve been trickling in for hours

Seeking the sweetness of the sugared lees

Of milky cocoa - many dead, drowned,

Sunk, buried in watery 
grave. Many afloat, 
struggling like soldiers  

In a stygian moat

Around a grand redoubt,

Many still marching in, dozens, scores,

Coming in headfirst, blind, thoughtless,

Like foolhardy soldiers.

I have sat for hours, beguiled,

Watching, beaming, slapping my thigh

Like a fat war-winning General,

Like Mr Jehovah cracking up

With laughter while watching

Egyptians going belly-up

In the Red Sea.