Dear Editor, I simply must take issue with an article that appeared in the November 28th edition of the Observer Newspaper under the caption “Hard Times For Love.” The writer is to be commended for her courage in bringing before your readership the sensitive and polarizing issue of “consensual sex” between “gay men.” She has provided a wonderful platform from which to launch a discourse on heterosexual vs. homosexual relationships”not the typical shouting match that demonizes and demoralizes the opponent and further demarcates between the gay and the ‘straight,” but honest and respectful dialogue that brings together all the social stakeholders, particularly the clergy. The writer, to her credit, and admittedly to good effect, has summoned everything from politics to religion, from culture to conscience, and from Australia to the United Nations to buttress her argument for legitimizing gay sex on Nevis. Let it be clear that while she chastises Caribbean culture for its “homophobia,” and cites the merits of a 1994 case challenging Australian law before the UN Human Rights Committee, it is obvious that the writer’s true intent in this article is to confront, and maybe even upbraid the prevailing Nevisian culture for its decided reticence to any sexual behavior that contravenes heterosexual boundaries. While she makes a good case for the ideals of equality and respect for personal choice and privacy, what the writer fails to do is to lift the debate from the usual narrow confines of moral relativism to its larger ideal of moral absolutes and objective reality. She touts the” “happiness” of those who espouse the gay lifestyle as a justifiable and desirable pursuit while failing to show that the chief end of man is not “happiness” but holiness, or wholeness’to use a less religious term. That the face of Nevis has changed over the years is an understatement. With the phenomenon of an increased expatriate residential community on Nevis, and the advent of CSME, we have become a more open and cosmopolitan society. If the face of Nevis has changed, so has the soul of Nevis, or its collective psyche, to keep pace with that change. I take no issue with these inescapable realities. Since I do not currently reside on Nevis, I challenge my colleagues in the clergy to take the mantle of leadership in the crusade to return sex to its only legitimate parameters’the marital bed. The time may have now come for there to be a movement akin to that in the United States of preserving the integrity of marriage as a time-honored institution by defining it as a union between one man and one woman. Rev. Theodore A. Griffin Pennsylvania
