FROM HOMOPHOBIA TO HOMOPHILIA...

The fact that Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, described gays as “lower
than dogs”, tells me nothing about gays, but everything about His Grace the
Archbishop. Nor can one doubt that the Archbishop of Kenia meant every word when
he proclaimed that - a propos the gay US bishop Gene Robinson - “the devil has
clearly entered the church”. If Africa is a Third World country pretending to be
a First World one, moral values are derivative and invariably relativistic.

In Africa, the homosexual has automatic low-life associations because sexual
taboos largely determine the social morality and behaviour of the tribe. While
in Spartan Greece, by contradistinction, ideologically charged homosexual
eroticism and sexuality were cornerstones of its elitist male-bonding culture.

Here, then, is the heart of the matter:

The taboo was not only a normative form of law but also, like a fervently held religious belief, the
guiding code for modes of behaviour that were its biological counterpart. Some
societies are more evolved of course, than others and, in any case, few taboos
still exert their original spell. But no community is favourably disposed
towards the apostate who is seeming to compromise the communality of the group,
and if it cannot bend him to its purpose it obviously become preferable to
ostracise him in what is essentially a manifestation of the communal faculty for
self-regulation - properly speaking, the jurisdiction of the man in the street -
which is fundamental to all anthropological thinking. Conformity to the tribal
habit expresses communal integrity. Transgression is tantamount to apostasy. The
logic is subtle, but also compellingly simple. In a word, to throw in one’s lot
- in the mythology of anthropology - with the proscribed forces of the universe,
is simply to perish with them.

But I was saying...

Fatuity being one of the worst symptoms of our present state of confusion (rather than of decline), or at any rate a power unique for its blinding opacity, the authenticity of the civil union, celebrated in Gene Robinson’s own church just six weeks ago - as distinguished from the passion of its participants - seems to be proof enough these days that not only men’s reasoning and intellectual capacities, but their instincts and emotions, too, are subject to two mutually antagonistic conceptions of love. For when two standards of judgment, of moral convention, of
human perfection no less, are fending for the right to forge the social and anthropological conditions of our future heritage, without question something very enormous indeed appears to be happening.

It is not, of course, impossible to imagine that posterity may have a different opinion. We must wait and see. What matters for the time being, however, is the degree to which the
ethical content of the multicultural world itself is being subjected to change;
that it is not even clear anymore which standards, whether moral, psychological
anthropological or otherwise, can be agreed upon for good or ill by all rational
human beings. And this, whether we like it or not, is the crux of the whole
perplexing business.

Dreamy