Rickyuzzy:
This ‘culture’ – or better put, traditions – that we have forced upon us in the infancy of our consciousness by thoughtless trading Europeans is not ours any more than the iPhone is a Nigerian invention.
Unfortunately the network of our historical and contemporary realities as Nigerians – including religion, mores, norms, dominant attitudes, and of course our system of archaic laws – came out of this mishmash of confusion and oppression. We acquired a way of life that was not ours, inefficiently adopted it into a way of life we were still evolving, and have ended up with confusion as the norm for our legal system.
It is the reason why Nigeria’s ‘culture’ has often been a cooking pot of inane debates, like the ones we used to have conscientiously in the 90s: should women be allowed to wear trousers? Neither first lady Aisha Buhari nor first bank chairman Ibukun Awosika would seriously entertain this debate today of course. But such is our culture that many women were actually called prostitutes in the 80s and the 90s because they wore what some religious leaders – ignorant of the non-binary, constantly evolving category-boundary history of male and female attire – called ‘men’s clothing’
When you mix a confused culture with an insecure and badly thought out system of laws, kept in place by clueless politicians and maintained in stone by religious leaders who have not read and understood enough of the world, what we have is the Nigeria of today: where minority rights are tramped upon, inane rules guide our conduct, and lawyers still wear ridiculous attire to represent clients in badly ventilated courtrooms.
It is from this same conundrum of ambiguity that we have that most oppressive of all Nigerian laws: that which stops two consenting adults from having a legitimate, non-criminalised relationship, simply because they have the same reproductive organs. For us as a country, we insist that for people to love each other in a romantic, sexual, intimate way, they must find someone with a different sexual organ than they, someone with a different gender construct than they. We are a society very obsessed with joysticks and vaginas.[/b]
[/b]When you ask people why they insist on this restrictive legal and cultural regime even though the global body of research across the world pinpoints homosexuality as a legitimate stop in the evolutionary epic, they say either of three things: a) it is not part of our culture; b) it is not natural; and c) our religions forbid it – by which mostly they mean the imported Christian and Muslim faiths, because there is nothing in the canon of Ifa, Ogun or any of the Igbo pantheon of gods that speaks against the freedom to love irrespective of gender and sexual organ.[/b]
I believe I have already addressed the question of culture, so let’s turn our minds to the question of nature.
Is it true that men having sex with men and women having sex with women is simply not natural? The preponderance of biological and anthropological evidence begs to disagree. And really it’s embarrassing that people are still making that argument in 2017.
“Sex-linked biology and gender relations, as well as the concepts of race and ethnicity, require conceptual clarity in order to determine the interactive influences of each in giving rise to health differentials. To narrowly focus on such concepts impedes an appreciation of the rich variety among humans.”
People of same gender have been having sex with each other for, as long as I know, the five thousand years of recorded history, everyone from Alexander the Great to Virginia Woolf. And, of course, everything from paintings of the San people of Zimbabwe to evidence from the Nzima people of Ghana shows proof of not just African homosexual sex, but also homosexual marriage. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing sensible about the accusation of unnatural as the Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari reminded the world in his spectacular book, Sapiens, last year. Anything that can happen is by definition natural. If two women can find a way to sexual pleasure, then by the obvious evidence nature already allows it. If a man can wear what we now call ‘female clothing’ and not fall down and die because of it, then it is by nature natural. Nature allows a massive spectrum of possibilities, he reminds us; it is us humans that limit the possibilities with our fears, taboos and phobias, not nature.
But let’s still investigate the word ‘natural’. Is there anything intrinsically positive about the Natural? In the first few centuries after Christ, it was very natural for a man to have 14 children and to lose more than a dozen of them to disease, and it was very natural for bacteria to wipe off millions of people because there was none of the medicines we have now. Those were very natural. And yet here we are now, as a race, having overcome those challenges, because we found ‘unnatural’ ways to fight nature through medicine. Indeed, humanity has spent the past two million years, since man discovered fire, fighting and running away from ‘nature’. We build houses to escape the rain. We buy shaving powder to get rid of the natural hair that grows on our chins and armpits. And we have unnatural caesarian operations because sometimes nature is careless, thoughtless and pointless.
Nothing about how we live our lives today is ‘natural’. Indeed, if a man from ancient Greece woke up today and saw a world with stock exchanges, female presidents, iPhones, and Twitter threads, he would scream and rave at the unnaturalness of it all. But that is how humanity advances. We move forward. We leave the past behind, not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with the past, but because the past is limited. We now know so much about our universe and ourselves than people of the past knew.
Indeed one of the most fascinating things about human nature is how many of us are here, free, today because of the ways that society has advanced beyond what was natural many decades and centuries ago, including slavery, segregation and female circumcision, and yet we want the world to stop moving because we have now arrived.
To excuse this dissonance, point often to ‘nature’. We then purport to speak for God, by claiming that what we deem natural today – even though it wasn’t ‘natural’ for people just a century ago – is what God says is natural for all people as well. We take God as our all purpose excuse to fight change, to fight difference, to insist on our own intrinsic superiority.
Ridiculous, isn’t it?
And this is where religion has played a villain’s role. As Ali A. Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim, presciently points out, “Culture is always evolving. But religion freezes culture in time. Religion dogmatizes culture and arrests its evolution.”
But as natural selection teaches us – and if you don’t believe in natural selection, a cursory reading of received history teaches us – there is no point in the past that was perfect and godly. I mean, have you read your bible lately? The entirety of the Old Testament is a long, repetitive record of sinful, reprobate cultures. Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, all these prophets moaned and bemoaned how deeply unrighteous people were. So when Christian warriors say they want to restore biblical morality, I say ‘huh’?
There was no perfect stasis of righteousness in the past. The world has only gotten better as it has progressed forward. We are a generation healthier, richer and more at peace with our neighbours than any generation in times past. Since the Second World War, however, rates of violent death have fallen to the lowest levels in known history. Today, the average person is far less likely to be slain by another member of the species than ever before—an extraordinary transformation that has occurred, almost unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this article. If asked to choose between living in the times of Joshua and living in the times of Donald Trump, I assume you many of us should choose the much more peaceable times of today.
That doesn’t mean the past was wrong. It means the past was limited, and cannot be our standard for forging the future.
Moving away from the past has helped us discover that we have been unfair to those who are different from us, and has given us the tools and knowledge to treat them fairer, and with the love and acceptance that the divinity of Jesus – being the same, yesterday, today and forever, knowing the end of a thing even from the beginning – already preached those 2000 years ago Jerusalem that we must love our neighbours, even with their imperfections, as we love ourselves.
What makes us expend more energy asking for young gay men to be jailed and killed than for all our past leaders to be rounded up and jailed? How is Dino Melaye more ‘natural’ and ‘human’ than Ellen DeGeneres?
What kind of stupid ass system of mores and laws arrives at such a pointless, ridiculous conclusion?
We must rethink the ways we have used religion as an excuse to hold others back and in doing that, punish ourselves by holding ourselves back. Because where there are hateful laws like we have in Nigeria, societies have historically proven that their progress will be slow. You cannot advance forward if you hold your people back with hate.
Is it really a coincidence that Africa is both the least tolerant continent on earth as well as the poorest?
We live in a country where it is legal to be Senator Sani Yerima and illegal to be Apple CEO Tim Cook, and we want to make progress?
It is time to look inwards into the deplorable mess of cultural, religious and legal restrictions that we have tired ourselves in and open our hearts, minds and spirits to the joy, progress and advancement that truly equitable and fair laws can bring to a thirsty nation.
That is not a gay agenda. That is an equality agenda. It is not an equal debate if those who are against gay peoples have rights and freedoms that gay people don’t have. You are able to get married, walk about freely, speak openly about who you had a date with yesterday, but they can’t. How can you quarrel with them wanting that? How is that a ‘bad’ ‘agenda’?
Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot love a person if you deny the person rights and freedoms just because you don’t approve of how they live their lives.
That is not love. That is wickedness.
Chude Jideonwo, the Chief Executive Officer of Joy, Inc., delivered this keynote address – THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL, TRADITIONAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS ON FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF SEXUAL MINORITIES IN NIGERIA – at the annual Human Rights, Sexuality and the Law Symposium by The Initiative for Equal Rights on 13 December 2017, in Lagos, Nigeria in commemoration of the International Day for Human Rights. I just want to know how many days it took you to draft this write up |
Romance › Re: It Is Unnatural To Be Gay, No One Is Born That Way by jasonodion: 3:09pm On May 27, 2018
