At the Commonwealth Meeting this week UK Prime Minister Theresa May reportedly offered aid and support for member states of the Commonwealth that repeal anti gay and lesbian laws pledging to help them know that the world is different nowadays and people should be allowed the freedom to choose who to love. Since the Nigerian president also visited the UK PM this week I do not know whether the issue was discussed or not but I intend to talk about that request at length today. I will be discussing this alongside the reported remark by the Benue State Commissioner for Education who raised the alarm that there is similarity in the consequences of the terrorist tactics of armed herdsmen destroying schools especially primary and secondary schools in the state and that of Boko Haram whose name means’ No to western education’. The consequences of both the herdsmen raids on schools and farms and that of Boko Haram are not unintended consequences the Commissioner lamented loudly, but planned and deliberate action to slow down the growth of education in other parts of the nation as Boko Haram has done so effectively in the six states of the former North East of Nigeria.
These two events, Theresa May’s plea for LGBT recognition at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting [CHOGM] and the destruction of primary and secondary schools in Benue State and the North East form the kernel of discussion today. We will look at the two issues in all ramifications especially how importantly they affect humanity and civilization and the background of how gay values evolved and how they impact religion and culture. These are touchy issues but since the British PM has belled the cat it is high time we spoke the truth as we know it in this part of the world. Which, fortunately or not, is still a part of the Commonwealth with its own dose of the historical, or should we say – the usual all – pervading colonial mentality.
According to statistics 36 out of 52 nations in the Commonwealth regard homosexuality as a criminal act and the history of that dates back to the Colonial era where Sodomy Acts ban sex between people of the same sex. So most Commonwealth nations have just not repealed such acts which the Mother nation of the Commonwealth through its PM is asking them to do with the dangling carrot, for now of aid and I presume sanctions later if they reject the offered carrot. Worse still, the British PM gave a historical analogy that the world has changed and that in the early fifties the British Monarch and Head of the Commonwealth traveled the world in five weeks but now the world is a global village and the whole world is watching the Commonwealth Games in Australia and CHOGM in London simultaneously. Yet, it is apparent that majority of Commonwealth nations loathe same sex marriage and that is why they have criminalized what the UK government and leader is urging them to adopt to show they are modern and are moving with the times. Sadly and very strongly I disagree with the British PM and wish to tell her that it is her nation that has fallen out of step in the march of modernity and development and it is Britain that should retrace its step and retract from being a LGBT rights peddling nation to one that recognizes that marriage is between a man and a woman and not between two men or two women. Indeed in the 36 out of the 52 Commonwealth nations that Britain is wooing, it is their culture and way of life and a sign of human progress that men and women should marry and procreate and a sign of backwardness and inhumanity and a perversion of good culture and upbringing for people of same sex to love each other like a man would love a woman. Of course it goes with the public mood and fashion in Western Europe nowadays to brand those who resent LGBT people as intolerant and unaccommodating but then European values are deteriorating and are decadent when men are men are expected to marry when it is obvious they can not on their own raise children. I think it is European nations who should pause at the cliff edge of their decadence and take another look at why majority of their former colonies do not agree with them on gay rights.
I urge the Europeans to look at China and the former Soviet Union and see what those two nations value now and in their recent past. China today is having hundreds of cooperative projects to build infrastructure, roads, power plants along the old historical route called Belt and Silk Road where in the past trade routes were opened linking China with Asia and from where economic travels and migration created the likes of Marco Polo in the history of global trade and commerce. Although the Chinese government is unrepentantly atheist and communist same sex rights are non existent in China just as they are extolled in Britain. Yet China practises the philosophy of Confucius which preaches hard work honesty and diligence. Whereas Max Weber had written that Protestant ethics of hard work, punctuality make such protestants or Calvinists successful capitalists, I am sure Weber will be fuming in his grave to see that descendants of Protestants and Calvinists are now in their new world selling same sex marriage to people who abide by the dictates of the bible that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Similarly Russia was a Marxist state where state terrorism was government policy to execute opposition leaders and entrench the goals and objectives of Lenin and later Stalin.