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.