Orville Taylor | Dick stands alone

A surname like mine often makes me the butt of corny jokes. However, having a dressmaker mother, and more than basic competence with a sewing machine and scissors, the joke is on those who asked me if I can fabricate garments.

Even more mischievously, it is sometimes made clear that I am quite competent at cutting cloth.

However, when you have a surname like that of my good friend of the cloth, you have to be extremely careful of being drawn into a controversial references and more importantly, time very carefully the utterances you make, especially when a very vocal portion of the population is not only highly melanised, but is dark in other senses. Further some subjects make us even darker. Not being present in the meeting, never a Baptist or anything that sounds like that, I have no inside knowledge as to why reverend Devon Dick felt that not only was it necessary, but it was the right time to raise a question as to whether or not that particular denomination or the church itself could give any kind of acknowledgement to gay unions.

Frankly, on the surface of it, it is indeed a great opportunity for the church in Jamaica to speak with one single and unambiguous voice. One of the most brilliant minds in the entire CARICOM, Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley was asked in an international forum, whether or not her government was prepared to legislatively support gay marriages.

She was unequivocal. For her, government has a place in recognising to some extent, the kind of relations that exist among people. However, she was clear that in a region where the church plays a major role, there is unanimity that marriage officers are typical members of the clergy, then for her, the remit of that particular endorsement has to be the church.

Try as you may, irrespective of the fact that we have religious minorities, the Caribbean and in particular Jamaica, is a Christian region. All of our oaths, our national song, our national anthem and every means of official affirmation, squarely places God, a Christian version of him by the way, at the centre of our moral code. Marriage therefore, from a West Indian and Jamaican point of view, is a church matter. My assumption thus, is that Dick is caught between a rock and a hard place. Put the issue on the churches’ agenda so that once and for they could speak with unanimity and shut down the debate faster than some politicians would like Integrity Commissions investigation.

But this is Jamaica and in as much as some religious sects have a different opinion of sex in the United States and The United Kingdom, all of our denominations including the majority Adventists which cover more than 12 per cent of the population are very clear about what kind of sexual behaviour is appropriate and accordingly, what type of unions are endorsed.

More than 80 per cent of Jamaicans, me included, were born out of wedlock, making us all a set off erstwhile illegitimate offspring. Thank God for our exceptional standards regarding cleanliness especially when eating; so we are not dirty bustard.

Despite this reality, of us being literally born in sin, our world record numbers of churches draws a sharp line in stone about us being ‘shapen in iniquity.’

No pastor with even a passing acquaintance of the teachings of Jesus would endorse the overwhelming majority of us who were living in faithful concubinage. In the well known but hardly read book, My Mother Who Fathered Me, she even noted that the majority of households, some 70 per cent, had a resident father. Of course anchored around a stable cohabiting but unmarried couple.

Now, based on the Property Rights of Spouses Act, the statute recognises, subject to a judicial decision, the treatment of five year old cohabiting relationships, the majority form as the legal equivalent of marriage.

Importantly, under Section 2, a spouse is someone of the opposite sex, a “single woman who has cohabited with a single man as if she were in law his wife for a period of not less than five years; and (b) a single man who has cohabited with a single woman as if he were in law her husband for a period of not less than five years.”

Secular society is always more ‘progressive’ than the church, especially since the Bible is revised from time to time; but God’s commands are clear. For the years in which most of us living ‘sweetheart lives’ were having unlicensed sex; none of us would dare go to church and ask Reverend to ‘bless us.’

Christianity, whether strictly that based on Jesus’ teachings or Paul’s guidelines, says that the only type of sex which can be approved, on pain of a cancellation of one’s heavenly visa, is between a married man and his wife.

No one brings any such questions about tolerance for ‘sexual immorality’ to Orthodox Jews or Muslims.

Now, this is not pushing a religious of even bigoted line. The fact is, as long as there is a code of behaviour which guides a religion; there are limits to what goes unto its agenda and what it can overlook. Bigotry is an essential feature of any ‘one way’ religion.

Christianity says, Jesus is the only port of entry. Backdoor entries are never ever possible.

Still, I might be alone here, but I will not get beating Dick on this issue. I am cutting him some slack: not slackness, because I believe that he simply wanted to church to speak authoritatively.

Still, it would have taken a miracle not unlike like that in Matthew 14:13-21.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com