GoodLife's straight members only competion -2-

I have since received a written reply from GoodLife in response to my complaint.

Tara McLain from the chain's marketing department sends this in her response:

Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. We were not aware that this legislation exists in Jamaica.

 

A part of the rules and regulations for this contest include the ability to substitute, modify etc. trips for any reason. Should you win this trip, we would be happy to award you with a trip of equal value to another destination.

 

We have connected with Tourism Jamaica and they provided us with the following information:

Jamaica welcomes visitors from all over the world and from all segments of society equally with the warmth and courtesy they expect and deserve. We recognize that there are diverse communities and cultures interested in Jamaica as a travel destination, and we embrace that diversity with respect.

 

In Jamaica, we are committed to the safety of all travelers. We respect the right of all visitors to Jamaica to express their own beliefs and to satisfy their own vacation experiences while staying with us.

 

We respect the choices of adults and responsible adult activities. In keeping with travel to any destination in the world, we encourage visitors to respect Jamaican laws and community standards, and to take reasonable  measures to enhance their travel experience. 

 

Please know that we welcome everyone with open arms and look forward to sharing the beauty that is Jamaica with them.

 

Thank you,

Tara

 

 

 

Tara McLain
Public Relations Specialist
Marketing & Public Relations Department

My response:

Dear Tara,

thanks for your prompt response. I trust that you appreciate that the Jamaican marketing person essentially confirmed what I said on my blog. Gay male winners of your competition who might innocently hold hands or show affection in public in Jamaica will likely be attacked in public places and face up to ten years in jail should they engage in sexual intercourse. 

Nowhere on your posters do you warn your gay members of your gym of this risk, nowhere on your posters do you even mention that gay people who might win this competition would be able to choose an alternative location. Do you plan to issue warnings to your winners, just in case they happen to be gay?

I am a bit surprised that you think this should be the end of it!

A colleague of mine has since written about this issue here: http://fitisafeministissue.com/2015/04/06/goodlife-competition-for-straights-only/

May I suggest that you should take the concerns expressed in my blog a little bit more seriously and take action to address the concerns raised.

Sincerely,

udo Schuklenk

I am also delighted that fellow fitness friend, philosophy professor and blogger Samantha Brennan has taken up the issue on her own blog.

Goodlife's straight members only competition - Open Letter to its CEO

Dear Mr Patchell-Evans,

I am writing this Open Letter today to you, because I have been inundated in my local gym with advertisements linked to your gym chain's 36th anniversary. You run a competition among members offering a vacation in Jamaica to the winning member.

My partner and I have been members of your gym chain for many years. We happen to be gay. Your competition misleads members into thinking that Jamaica is a tourist destination like any other, sun, beach and a good time. Nothing good be further from the truth.

Jamaica is a militantly homophobic society, religious fundamentalists have written anti-gay provision into the country's constitution. Here is a helpful link to a 2014 report by the respected human rights organisation Human Rights Watch on anti-gay violence in Jamaica.

My husband and I would be up 'eligible' for an up-to ten year jail term should we choose to engage in sexual intercourse during a vacation we might win if we took part in your competition.

Local civil rights groups lament, 'serious human rights abuses, including assault with deadly weapons, of women accused
of being lesbians, arbitrary detention, mob attacks, stabbings, harassment of gay and lesbian patients by hospital and prison staff, and targeted shootings of such persons.'

Given the current attention to laws permitting the active discriminations against gay customers in Indiana, I cannot help but wonder what drove your company to offer a competition that would subject your gay and lesbian members to serious risk of bodily harm, not to say long jail terms, should they win your competition and decide to actually go to Jamaica.

I am writing to you today to ask that you cancel the ongoing competition and replace the 'Jamaica' labelled posters with posters that offer a vacation price, but a vacation of the winner's choosing. Otherwise, you really are telling your gay and lesbian members that our well-being and safety is of no concern to you, and that the current competition celebrating the chain's 36th anniversary is really addressed to the club's straight members only.

I am looking forward to your timely response.

Public Health Arguments and Civil Rights Protections

For some time now gay civil rights (aka gay rights) activists have argued that same sex relationships and conduct should be decriminalized because evidence shows that in societies that don't do so there is a higher prevalence of HIV among gay men.

Let there be no doubt, the latter claim of fact is true. There is a fairly substantial body of social science evidence demonstrating that. Opponents of gay rights typically point to that higher prevalence - even in societies that have decriminalized - to bolster their opposition. They usually argue that if their society decriminalized same sexual relationships  (aka buggery, to use that lovely colonial phrase invented by the Brits) even more folks would engage in that high risk behaviour and things would get worse on the HIV fronts. That isn't true, demonstrably so. This will have little impact on these campaigners' messaging, because they're god people. Their opposition to homosexuality is driven by religious convictions plus almost certainly deep-seated other psychological issues. After all, these are the same people that like equating pedophilia and homosexuality. Evidence for that claim is also difficult to come by. There's a method to this madness though, and it's a successful madness. Whole countries (Jamaica and Uganda are just two examples) these days are in the thrall of moral panics when it comes to the matter of homosexuality.

Now, gay rights activists have resorted to engaging in similarly flawed arguments to further their political objectives. To be fair, unlike god people they at least have some evidence on their side (i.e. homosexuality isn't pedophilia, criminalization leads to higher HIV prevalence). However, none of that creates a case for gay rights. At least it shouldn't. Civil rights cannot be contingent on non-immutable characteristics. What if it turned out to be the case that decriminalization of homosexuality led to higher HIV prevalence? Should one then join god people and their campaigns? Civil rights case closed? Obviously not. The case for civil rights cannot be based on public health arguments.

The case for civil rights protections is always and necessarily so based on individuals' liberty entitlements to live their lives as they see fit, as far as self-regarding actions are concerned, on privacy rights, their right to associate with whoever consenting adult(s) they see fit, their entitlement to see their needs treated equally to comparable needs that led to rights heterosexual people enjoy, and a gaggle of other related arguments. None of these arguments are contingent on the truth or otherwise of particular public health matters. After all, where would one go once it was possible to eradicate HIV with a simple pill being taken, or once a working preventative vaccine existed? Too bad for gay rights then? I think not.

That's not to say that opponents of gay rights should not be called on their lies and deception. However, by turning their arguments on their head no case is made for gay rights either.

Addendum: 12:29pm, July 25, 2014 EST.

Of course, it is true that civil rights protections also extend to certain kinds of choices (e.g. religion) as well as other not immutable characteristics such as language. I stuck to immutable because that case is easier to make and it applies to homosexuality.

Against the use of non-certified health 'remedies' in resource poor countries

My Editorial from the December issues of Developing World Bioethics.

Homeopathy organisations have taken to the skies to help sick people in resource poor countries as well as disaster zones. The thing about homeopathy is, of course, that there is zero evidence that homeopathic concoctions have any effect beyond that of other placebos.[1]Governments such as the UK's have clamped down on the quack therapy degrees that flourished for a good number of years in parts of its university sector. In 2007 a whopping 5 BSc degrees in homeopathy were offered; today there is none.[2]

While one could appreciate these homeopaths' good intentions, it is deeply unsettling that people without proper medical training use donations provided by their supporters to travel to developing countries and essentially apply their unproven concoctions on sick and dying people. During Haiti's recent cholera epidemic, on their own account they provided ‘remedies’ to cholera patients.[3] The term ‘remedy’ is probably carefully chosen by these people who show up in impoverished Haitian communities in medical-doctor-like white coats,[4] clearly giving the impression to the undereducated local populace that they are health care professionals. This masks to the uninitiated observer as well as to the local patients that their remedies are precisely that, concoctions that have no proven medicinal value. They are not medicines. The homeopathic emperor really is naked. I didn't say it first, but it is still true.

David Shaw, writing in the British Medical Journal, reports that ‘training’ programs have been set up that ‘train’ locals in homeopathy. He writes, ‘the creation of homeopathic pharmacies increases the likelihood that Haitians will not obtain effective treatments for future illnesses. Training 38 people as homeopaths simply compounds the unethical effects of Homeopaths Without Borders' presence in Haiti, as does the attempt at legitimisation represented by their attempt to obtain official licences.’[5]

A different example: other activists reportedly traveled from the USA to virulently anti-gay Jamaica to ‘heal’ gay Jamaicans and turn them into heterosexuals.[6] Vulnerable Jamaicans were subjected to treatments that are known not to work. What is by now illegal in many jurisdictions, namely offering and providing treatments for homosexuality, is now exported to resource-poor countries. Damage is predictably done to the psychological well-being of perfectly healthy gay Jamaicans.

It appears to be the case that the developing world has become a playground for the vaguely health-related activities of activists that have been thoroughly discredited in the wealthier and better educated parts of the world. These are shocking developments.

It is an interesting question how one should approach an ethical critique of these sorts of activities, namely of well-heeled Westerners abusing their privileged situation to inflict at best unproven medical concoctions and treatments on vulnerable populations in resource poor countries. If they were professionals (say in the Jamaican case if they were psychologists or psychiatrists, or in the Haitian case medical doctors or nurses) one could report them to their professional regulatory bodies. Unfortunately, these people are not professionals, hence appeals to ethical professionalism or professional bodies fail. Appeals to common sense are also likely to fail, because who other than a fanatic would want to travel to other countries to spread the word about concoctions that they know are not taken seriously by specialist professionals in their home countries?

Ethically, all that's left to say for the Haitian situation is that it is harmful to use such unproven concoctions and therapies on patients seeking help. It is also unacceptable to present oneself as a health care professional when one is not. For actual health care professionals providing homeopathic concoctions, the charge would be that they are acting unprofessionally by not providing standard, proven medical care. Cholera cannot be addressed with unproven homeopathic remedies. People will inevitably get hurt. For the Jamaican case, the harm to perfectly healthy people is again what is at issue. It will be distressing to these people both to undergo whatever ‘therapy’ is visited upon them, and it should be just as distressing to note that they failed, given the prevalent anti-gay sentiments in the country.

Harm is also done to impoverished communities by the fundraising activities of these organisations. Gullible donors will waste valuable financial resources that could go to actual sensible health care or development goals and that will instead be diverted toward the establishment and dissemination of quack therapies and treatments in resource poor environments.

To my mind governments in the West should police these activities in the same manner that they police the activities of sex tourists who travel to resource poor countries to exploit children. Equally, governments in Haiti, Jamaica and elsewhere should not permit their most vulnerable citizens to be abused by representatives of such organizations.

• 1
  K. Smith. Against homeopathy: a utilitarian perspective. Bioethics 2012; 26(8): 398–409.
  

  Direct Link:

  • Abstract
  • Full Article (HTML)
  • PDF(127K)
  • Web of Science® Times Cited: 6
• 2
  D. Colquhoun. 2012. Complementary medicine course in varsities: how I beat the varsity quacks. The Telegraph January 31.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9051103/Complementary-medicine-courses-in-universities-how-I-beat-the-varsity-quacks.html [Accessed 6 October 2013].
• 3
  L. Fox. 2013. Continuing Ed and Clinic with the Port-au-Prince Homeopaths Communitaires. http://homeopathswithoutborders-na.org/?p=1343 [Accessed 5 October 2013].
• 4
  If images on their website are anything to go by.
• 5
  D. Shaw. Homeopaths without Borders Practice Exploitation not Humanitarianism. BMJ 2013; 347: f5448.
  

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  U. Schüklenk & R. Smalling, Queer patients and the health care professionals: regular arrangements matter. Journal of medical humanities 2013; 34(2): 96.
  

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The reasonableness of atheism

The Jamaican national broadsheet The Gleaner published during the last two weeks columns by one of its columnists, Ian Boyne, attacking atheists. You can find them here and here. Today the paper published my response to Boyne. I replicate that response below.

Over the last two weeks, Ian Boyne decided to call a spade a spade as far as us annoying atheists are concerned. They were two overly long columns, saturated with names of people he likes and scorns. Their authority typically is celebrated by means of affiliation or Oxford University generally.

Boyne even manages to ascribe competencies to Christian writers he agrees with that they demonstrably do not have. Alistair McGrath, a Christian theologian trained in history whose qualifications even include a doctorate in molecular biology, is declared without further ado a philosopher by Mr Boyne.

While he says he is braced for ad hominem attacks by 'trite atheists', it strikes me that such generalised statements about a very diverse group of people are, well, ad hominem themselves, aren't they? Reading his columns, I tried to understand what his message to the reading public is other than walking away with the bragging rights of having read more books than those 'trite atheists'.

Well, I have only one column in which to respond to Mr Boyne. I am actually a trained philosopher, in fact a professor of philosophy, and I happen to be an atheist. I can truthfully say that I've read the works of most people he mentions in his columns. Some of these authors I happen to know well personally. Alas, that has not persuaded me of the reasonableness of theism, and that, surely, is what Mr Boyne is after.

I will not spend the next few paragraphs dropping names on you, or at least there will be very few. I will focus on arguments, not prestige, affiliation and whatnot. What I will do is to address - hidden under all those names and Oxford University Press volumes - what I take to be Mr Boyne's main bones of contention with philosophical atheists.

They seem to be these: As human beings, our capacity to understand things in the world is limited by our biological limitations. There could be realities that are beyond our scientific abilities to discover.

Among others, one of Mr Boyne's favourite Christian apologists, Alvin Plantinga, has developed this kind of argument. He claims that we would have no reason to assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable if they were just the product of evolutionary processes. So, he ends up proposing a form of evolution - many of Mr Boyne's fellow Christians will shudder in disbelief - that includes an element of divine guidance, as only that would give us reason to trust our faculties. After all, God wouldn't fool around with us, or would He/She/It? Well, most philosophical atheists happen to be philosophical naturalists. Guilty as charged, Mr Boyne.

We acknowledge our scientific limitations. To us, the fact that our intellectual capacities are limited by the state of our evolution is not evidence that there is something else to be discovered that is outside our senses and that we just cannot grasp.

BOYNE DESPERATE

Incidentally, talking in this context vaguely about 'non-scientific ways of knowing', as Mr Boyne does, sounds a tad bit desperate to me. Unless he, or his fellow Christian apologists, give us a bit more meat to play with, let me just say that I do think this theological emperor is pretty naked. It appears to me that naturalistic processes provide us with the necessary reliability in selecting true beliefs about the world around us.

How can we test that claim? One way would be to point to our never-ending and ever-accelerating scientific progress. We know more about the world and the universe than we ever did. Insisting that there could be something else around us that we just cannot grasp by means of scientific inquiry is, for all practical intent and purposes, just hand-waving by the religious.

Is it possible that there is something else in the universe that we cannot grasp because of how we have evolved? Sure, it's possible. Just as it is possible that our planet rests on a metaphysical teapot that our scientific methods have so far been unable to discover and that requires Boynian 'non-scientific ways of knowing' to understand it.

What I am trying to get at is that raising this exceedingly unlikely possibility is clutching at straws. It's a desperate attempt by theists to avoid drowning in an ever-increasing sea of scientific knowledge.

So, even if Professor Schellenberg has a philosophical point, nothing follows with regard to the reasonableness of theism. Perhaps that is the reason why he is an atheist. At the end of the day, you have to assign probabilities to these sorts of theoretical possibilities. And the probabilities are vanishingly low for the God proposition.

To support his views, Mr Boyne cites an atheistic philosopher, Thomas Nagel, at great length. The thing about Nagel is that his book on the subject matter (as well as an earlier article in a leading philosophy journal) was ripped to pieces by evolutionary biologists and philosophers specialising in the study of biology. Nagel does not appear to have a sound grasp of

evolutionary theory. Hence his tacit support for 'intelligent design' is not based on a sound understanding of the scientific matters at stake.

MISPLACED EXCITEMENT

Mr Boyne also gets excited about another poster boy of current-day Christian apologetics, William Lane Craig. Boyne claims that he has seen many an atheist debate Lane Craig, but he has not seen a single one floor him. Funnily enough, I have seen many of these debates, too, and it seems to me that Lane-Craig looks bad in pretty all of them, but so it goes, I guess. You'll always give more credence to those batting on your team.

Lane Craig's claim to fame has been his attempt to recycle medieval Christian and Islamic theologians' attempts at proving the existence of God by means of a cosmological argument.

Basically what's done in this argument is to use remarkable features of our natural world, particularly its origin in the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago, and posit God as the best explanation. Of course, 'God' is really a place-holder indicating what we do not know today. If history is anything to go by, we are likely able to find out tomorrow.

However, even if we never found out, 'God' would still not constitute an explanation for things we do not understand in the world around us. And if we do find out, there would probably be some further mystery for which 'God' will be offered as an 'explanation'.

At the heart of this all, seemingly, is the need of religious believers to attain something approaching certainty about their various godly saviours. If they had simply decided to stick to believing that their God exists, everything would be hunky-dory. But no, they started fantasising about ways of 'knowing' about their invisible friend in the sky. They tried hard to develop logical proofs for the existence of their gods, and what not else. All that failed.

Even if one granted them everything they're saying about the limitations of scientific inquiry, nothing follows at all with regard to the existence of 'God'. Scientists would have no problems at all adapting their methods if they turned out to deliver new insights. Meanwhile, vague reference to 'non-scientific ways of knowing' won't do.

To give credit where credit is due, Mr Boyne seems to search seriously for answers to obvious doubts that he must have about his beliefs. Why else would he spend this much time engaging in debates with 'trite' atheists in the pages of this paper? After all, he could squander words beating up on homosexuals, as his fellow columnist Mr Espeut is wont to do.

It's a good thing that Mr Boyne, even if he cannot let go of his beliefs, is looking sincerely at the arguments. There is some empirical evidence to suggest many people might never be able to let go of their deeply held religious beliefs. It could well be biological and irreversible. No, I am not kidding here. In case you care about religiosity as a biological phenomenon, you might want to check out Andrew Newberg and Eugene D Aquili's book Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

Udo Schuklenk is a professor of philosophy at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and with Russell Blackford co-author of '50 Great Myths About Atheism'. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com. Schuklenk tweets @Schuklenk

On ethical tourism

My latest OpEd in the Kingston Whig-Standard

 

Clearly the time has already come for some of the snowbirds among us to organize our trips down south during the coming winter months. Holiday resorts across the Caribbean are busily advertising their latest, best deals to us. And aren’t they nice, these ads? Lush rain forests, carefree, friendly locals, drinks on the beach, romance, the lot. You can’t help but think you’re heading to paradise. The reality, in at least some of these countries, is quite different.

Take Jamaica as just one example. I don’t know whether you have missed the easy-to-overlook news about the nearly weekly occurrences of anti-gay violence in Jamaica. A transgender teenager was hacked to pieces by a local lynch mob very recently. During the next few weeks there were several other reported incidents of mobs attacking other gay individuals, prompting the local police to mount rescue missions.

The Jamaican government does precious little to improve the situation of gay people in the country. Male homosexuality is illegal courtesy of an unholy coalition of colonial laws kept alive by the influence of fundamentalist preachers and the sub-standard level of education of the general population. It’s a dreadful situation, no matter how you look at it.

Gay and lesbian Jamaican ex-pats have quietly begun to organize a tourism boycott campaign. Their analysis suggests that, given Jamaica’s dependence on tourism, the government would begin to listen to their concerns if more and more tourists stayed away in disgust at the human rights situation in the country. Of course, one would want to ensure that the Jamaican High Commission in Ottawa hears about our decision. After learning about these issues I wrote to Her Excellency this week that Jamaica, with regret, was off my list of holiday destinations until things change.

But ethical tourism? Really? Should we make choices about our holiday destinations on issues other than location, time, price and quality of the resort? Believe it or not, despite being an ethics teacher, I’m not a fanatic on these or any other matters of ethics. There is little point in asking others to make sacrifices they consider unreasonable, even if I might be prepared to make those sacrifices.

But is it unreasonable to switch from, say, Jamaica to Costa Rica or to a Mexican state that supports marriage equality? How should we decide where to go? Surely Costa Rica or Mexico are also going to have some ethical issue or another! And how long would this whole thing take, anyway, given that all I want is to book a carefree vacation? Fair enough questions to ask.

How should we decide? My suggestion would be to use fairly uncontroversial criteria such as a country’s human rights record, its environmental protection efforts and possibly issues such as educational attainment, health care and other human welfare indicators.

So, with all that, you say, we might not go on vacation at all, because realistically we would spend the next few years figuring out how particular holiday destinations are doing instead of actually going there.

Not quite. It turns out that the Internet, as so often is the case, offers a whole host of websites that actually have done the work on our behalf already. To give you just one example, the site ethicaltraveller.org evaluates every country based on the criteria I have proposed. It makes no bones about the fact that there is no perfect holiday destination, but some clearly are way better than others. For this year it has the following top 10 ranking: Barbados, Cape Verde, Costa Rica, Ghana, Latvia, Lithuania, Mauritius, Palau, Samoa and Uruguay.

You could, if you really cared enough, do the legwork yourself. Amnesty International provides excellent country-based reviews of the human rights situations in particular countries that you might consider visiting as a tourist. This would matter to you if you thought human rights should take priority over environmental issues. Environmental organizations provide similar rankings, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) produces annually a freely accessible Human Development Report. The latter gives you a good indication on whether a particular country government does well by its people.

Are there good reasons against tourism boycotts? Of course there are. For starters, for a tourism boycott on ethical grounds to be useful it should target countries that rely heavily on tourism. It would be foolish to target China with a tourism boycott, because whether or not tourists come or stay at home makes little to no difference to China’s continuing rise.

All you would do is harm businesses and their employees without effecting any policy change at all. That would be a pointless boycott to begin with. So there you have a good argument against a particular tourism boycott.

Another argument goes that if you go as a tourist to places that violate human rights you have a chance to influence what’s happening locally by supporting those oppressed by the country’s majority culture or government. That is somewhat doubtful, isn’t it? In the case of Jamaica you would likely be holed up in a holiday resort and your interactions with “the locals” would be pretty limited.

Also, in all honesty, when we are on vacation we are not usually on a crusade to fix a country’s social ills by organizing demonstrations in the wake of another senseless mob attack, even if we were not prevented by the country’s laws from doing so in the first place. When I’m on vacation I want a break!

But why should we care at all? My view is that we should assist others in attaining better lives, or even just lives worth living, as long as we don’t pay an unreasonably high price for doing so. Even if it does sound a tad bit bombastic, the world really would be a better place if more of us followed this rule. In the particular case of choosing a holiday destination it seems that we would pay a fairly small price by deliberately choosing one Caribbean holiday destination over another based on the country’s treatment of all of its people, its environmental record or any other issues that matter to us.

Udo Schuklenk teaches bioethics at Queen’s and tweets @schuklenk

A long overdue Open Letter to the Jamaican High Commissioner

Dear High Commissioner:

I have noticed increasing reports about breathtaking levels of discrimination (as well as hate crimes) that are meted out against gay and lesbian Jamaicans. Like others reading about this I have drawn the conclusion that I will not visit Jamaica as a tourist. It would be unconscionable to support a society that violates the civil rights of its sexual minorities in the way your society does.

Sincerely,
Udo Schuklenk

The German political system's bizarre state of affairs on offended Muslims

A remarkable article in the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL reports an incident in the German state of North Rhine Westfalia. A bunch of radical rightwingers and a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims ran into each other during a demonstration. The rightwingers clearly intended to provoke the Muslims by showing a Danish cartoon depicting the religious figurehead of Islam in a not particularly favorable pose. As you might recall, when a conservative Danish broadsheet published said cartoon there was a big outcry amongst Muslims (they don't like any depictions of their prophet, neither positive nor negative ones). A lot of people were duly killed by enraged Muslims (including, not unexpectedly, many Muslims). So, when in Germany the rightwing activist group Pro-NRW announced its demonstration and its intention to display the Danish cartoon it knew that its favoured enemy, enraged Muslims, would show up and make complete and militant fools of themselves. and so they did. - Between the two of us, without the help of radical Muslims and anti-Islamophobia leftist counter demonstrators, nobody would have taken notice of the 30 or so pro-NRW demonstrators. But hey, like bulls don't take lightly to red sheets of cloth neither do Muslims or leftists in Germany take kindly to a tiny rightwing group trying to look like they actually have the people on the ground to organise a serious demonstration. Fun was had by all involved: The end result, a whole bunch of seriously injured people, including police officers trying to keep the peace between the two sides.

None of this is terribly newsworthy, of course. Rightwingers (especially rightwing Christians) and fundamentalist Muslims love having goes at each other in Western societies, because the rightwing Christians mistakenly believe they own these places and need to defend them against Muslims wanting to establish Sharia law. It's of course a good idea to defend the secular state against any kind of religiously motivated legislation (lest you want to live in failing states like Iran or pseudo-outfits like the Vatican).

Here's the odd bit. The interior minister of the state where said demonstration took place wants to place restrictions on future demonstrations by the extreme rightwing group. A prohibition on showing the offending Danish cartoon during public demonstrations is in the making. Here is the tortured logic: The Islamic fundamentalists count about 1500 members according to the German security services. There is about 4 million Muslims in Germany that want to have little, if anything, to do with their violence. In order to protect German police officers from their violence it is necessary to prevent the extreme rightwingers from showing the cartoon during their demonstrations.

I have no sympathies for the rightwingers here, but it seems to me as if the German state is caving in to Muslim fundamentalists.  German citizens would - in future - be prohibited from doing things that could offend members of a Muslim fundamentalist sect in the country, lest the Muslims would otherwise go on a rampage injuring police officers and other demonstrators. Freedom of speech is subjugated to concerns about security of the security forces (whose job, among many other obligations, ironically, is to uphold German citizens rights to express even harsh criticism of religious ideologies). I can't wait to hear how the German courts will respond to this interior ministerial edict.

Interesting parallel:  in Jamaica, a Caribbean island state known for its large number of militantly anti-gay Christian citizens, we see the police routinely prohibiting demonstration by gay civil rights groups. Their logic also is that there are so many enraged Christians out there that they couldn't guarantee the safety of the demonstrators (at least - unlike in Germany - they're not concerned about the security of the security forces). Another example of a democratic society caving in to religiously motivated militancy.

The trouble with religious freedom is that it is all too frequently misunderstood as the unrestricted freedom of the religious to run roughshot over everyone else.

HIV/AIDS in Jamaica

One is tempted to feel sorry for Jamaica’s Health Minister, the Honourable Rudyard Spencer. There he is, trying his best to do his job, and, among other urgent health matters, reduce the incidence of HIV/AIDS in his nation. Unfortunately, on his own account, this is proving to be next to impossible lest Jamaicans change their cultural attitudes to – you guessed it – sex. The Jamaican Ministry of Health website quotes him with these eminently sensible concerns about specific attitudes: ‘These include a widely held belief that sex with a virgin can cure HIV/AIDS, the high level of sexual relations between older men and young girls and a persistently hostile anti-gay environment which all contribute to the stigmatization and discrimination of infected and affected persons. A strong religious culture also inhibits open discussion on matters of sexuality.  … We to [sic!] need begin the process of unlearning those beliefs that endanger the health lives of others and rethinking the tendency to be obscene and degrading in rejecting values that conflict with our own.”[1]

A bit of background on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica:  2008 study commissioned by the Ministry of Health concluded that about 31.8% of men who have sex with other men (MSM) are HIV infected in the island state.[2] There is a strong correlation between men being HIV infected and them belonging to lower socioeconomic groups, and them having been victims of antigay violence. Thankfully the number of AIDS deaths per year is decreasing because the country has begun the rollout of antiretroviral medicines.

The Jamaican Health Minister and others tasked with improving public health have their work cut out for them. The country has the second-highest HIV-prevalence rate among MSM in the world, right after another notorious violator of the human rights of gay people, Kenya. Homosexual men in Jamaica rarely ever live in monogamous relationships because of the security risks involved in living with a member of the same sex over longer periods in the same household. This is partly a result of colonial legislation prohibiting same sexual activities among men. I decided to actually read-up on the relevant legislation. The flowery prose under the heading ‘Unnatural Offences’ is sufficiently antiquated that I should like to share it with you:

76. Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or with any animal, shall be liable to be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for a term not exceeding ten years.

77. Whosoever shall attempt to commit the said abominable crime, or shall be guilty of any assault with intent to commit the same, or of any indecent assault upon any male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable to be imprisoned for a term not exceeding seven years, with or without hard labour.

Up to 10 years of labour camp for a mature-age man who has voluntarily sex with another consenting adult male is a fairly draconian penalty for a self-regarding act. One justification for this law is hidden under that well-known Christian natural law moniker of ‘unnatural’. Unfortunately, for Jamaican law makers, there is no such a thing as unnatural conduct. If something is physically possible it is very much within the laws of nature, and therefore by necessity it is natural. Normatively nothing follows from this. The phraseology of the ‘unnatural’ explains and justifies nothing. Many natural things are not desirable, natural conduct can be unethical, even criminal. However, as is well known to legal philosophers, not all unethical behaviours ought to be illegal.[3] Declaring homosexual conduct unnatural, as this law does, is arguably unintelligible and it begs the question of why the law exists to begin with.

The Jamaican law is not making a case for why sexual conduct between consenting adults is unethical, and if it is unethical, why it should be legislated against. For good measure ‘abominable’ has been added to this ‘crime’. This does not add anything either by way of justification. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary enlightens us that the 14^th century originated word ‘abominable’ means that something is variously disagreeable or unpleasant or worthy of causing disgust or hatred. Finding something disagreeable or unpleasant is not a good reason to make it illegal, and frankly, whether I am disgusted by something you do is not a good yard stick either by which to determine whether an act ought to be criminal. Well, and what about that hatred criterion? No doubt plenty of Jamaicans hate gay people, but how does that provide a justification in terms of outlawing same sex sexual conduct among consenting adults? One does not have to be an old-fashioned liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill to realize that the criminal law has no right to interfere with the self-regarding actions of consenting adults.

Jamaica today finds itself in a difficult situation. Sectarian religious mores has been enshrined in law by its former colonial master, and has since been duly maintained as the gospel by generations of Jamaican politicians. Indeed, to give Jamaican legislators credit where credit is due, they have managed to uphold unreasonable religious dictates decades after the British have discarded them. There is little by way of actual enforcement in current-day, but as is well-known, legal norms are capable of creating as well as reinforcing extra-legal norms.

The official Jamaican government report on HIV/AIDS to the United Nations General Assembly (2010) acknowledges the problems this legislation is causing: ‘The political framework towards HIV has not changed. With outdated laws that present obstacles for adolescents, SW, MSM and prison inmates, prevention and treatment efforts to these populations are not able to be fully maximized. The existing political framework has also been implicated in contributing to the stigma and discrimination faced by MSM. Several efforts have been made in this area however, through the review of laws that stand as obstacles to prevention, but to date no major achievements are noted in this aspect of political support.’[4]

The US based human rights organization Human Rights Watchhas published a report a few years ago highlighting the pervasive nature of oftentimes violent homophobia in Jamaica.[5] The price MSM are paying in Jamaica for this situation is very significant indeed, as can be demonstrated by the extraordinarily high prevalence of HIV/AIDS among this group of Jamaicans. Research has shown that gay Jamaicans are reluctant to present with health problems that could disclose their sexual orientation to health care providers out of fear for reprisals by health care professionals and others. It goes without saying that such health care professionals acting in such a manner would be violating international codes of health care professional conduct such as the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Geneva, requiring, as it does, that doctors ‘WILL NOT PERMIT [sic!] considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient.’[6] However, many Jamaican MSM patients reluctance to consult health care professionals is indicative of the climate in the country. It might be coincidental, but I do wonder why the Medical Association of Jamaica, unlike so many other national medical association, is seemingly not a member association of the World Medical Association.

Enlightened politicians such as Jamaica’s Health Minister, the Honourable Rudyard Spencer and his staff find themselves in an unenviable situation. They are representing or working for a government that continues to support legislation that contributes significantly to the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS among MSM. Unlike in South Africa where church leaders have come together to support efforts aimed at reducing the incidence of HIV/AIDS, in Jamaica church leaders are busy trying to preserve the homophobic climate and legislative framework that assisted in giving rise to the public health problems the country faces today.[7]

It will be interesting to monitor how the situation will evolve in Jamaica. Many ethical questions arise not only with regard to the country’s unjust discrimination against its gay citizens, but also from a public health ethics perspective. The ethical challenge for Jamaica is far from unique, and it is this: is it ethical to uphold particular cultural values regardless of the human cost involved? 

Udo Schuklenk

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[1] Ministry of Health Jamaica. (2010) Culture Shift Needed to Help in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS. http://www.moh.gov.jm/general/latestnews/1-latest-news/346-culture-shift-needed-to-help-in-the-fight-against-hivaids- [Accessed 13 February 2011]

[2] Kaiser Health News. (2009) Continued Discrimination Against Jamaican HIV-Positive MSM Hinders Their Efforts To Seek Health Care, Advocates Say  http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/daily-reports/2009/march/12/dr00057435.aspx?referrer=search [Accessed 13 February 2011]

[3] Joel Feinberg. (1988) The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (Vol. 4): Harmless Wrongdoing. Clarendon Press: Oxford.

[4] Ministry of Health. (2010) UNGASS Country Progress Report 2010 Reporting: Jamaica National HIV/STI Program. Jamaica, March 31, 2010: p. 32.

[5] Human Rights Watch. (2004) Hated to Death. Human Rights Watch 16(6B): 1-79.

[6] World Medical Association. (2006) Declaration of Geneva. WMA: Geneva. http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/g1/index.html [Accessed 13 February 2011]

[7] Thaddeus M. Baklinski. (2008) Jamaican Church Leaders Say Homosexuality Will Not Be Accepted As Normal. http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2008/feb/08021804 [Accessed 13 February 2011]

Bizarre commentary by Jamaican literature prof on violent lyrics

I'm sure many of you have heard about how homophobic Jamaica is, all the way up to the murder of gays and lesbians. Part of the responsibility for this, it has been suggested by some, are antigay violent lyrics by local artists calling in their songs for the murder of gays and lesbians. Here's the take of a local academic arguing that gays and lesbians who call for such artists' concerts to be canceled and boycotted are 'pathological'. Check out her take on the issue first, and then read my commentary below. Turns out to be the case that she attended the latest CD launch of the artist who called in past lyrics for the murder of gay people. I sent the below reply to the newspaper that published her OpEd; realistically you won't see my riposte there, though. Jamaican public debate is sufficiently incestuous to prevent that from happening. -

To whom it may concern:

Professor Cooper's editorial, well-intentioned and unusually considerate (by Jamaican standards) doesn't add up. She complains essentially that a Jamaican singer whose repertoire included a song calling for the killing of gay people is still subjected to boycott campaigns by gays and lesbians in other countries. She calls such campaigns 'perverse'. Cooper considers the offending song's lyrics 'infamous', however anyone not wanting the singer to perform in their neighbourhood is acting under a 'particularly perverse pathology'. Really, is my attempt at keeping such artists out of my country sick, Professor Cooper? So, our Jamaican artist sings infamous songs, while those who would be at the receiving end of his murderous art are sick (aka pathological). Nice touch professor, truly a well-balanced statement. You should be safe in homophobic Jamaica (whatever that means these days).

What reasons has Professor Cooper on offer for her take on the issue?

Well, for starters, she points out that our artist hero hasn't sung the song in question for awhile and launched recently a CD hoping it would be bought by amongst others gays, lesbians, and - guess what - even slim people. Let me just say that to the best of my knowledge, he has not yet apologized and retracted the song in question. That a more market savvy performer tries to increase market share is understandable, but surely shouldn't be seen as evidence for a changed mind set.

Comes the professor's next reason: the US based ACLU is defending the artist's 'right' to perform. The ACLU, of course, also defends the KKK's right to propagate its racist views in public. It's the result of a particularly silly bit of US Constitution that puts virtually no limits on speech acts, unlike any other country in the world. You could not make such statements anywhere in Europe (neither the Jamaican artist's 'lyrics' nor the KKKs racist rabble-rousing). The result is that such societies are more cohesive and peaceful than the USA.

And another lost-case type argument from our literary professor. She claims, citing an unsubstantiated statement from an ACLU activist, that there is no causal evidence that hate speech calling for violence against minority groups leads to such violence. There is an obvious reason for this: actions usually have multiple causes, some conscious, others unconscious. We do know that propaganda works; why it shouldn't work in a pathologically homophobic place such as Jamaica remains a mystery to me. Gay people have experienced time and again spikes in anti-gay violence following high-profile homophobic statements by artists or politicians and the like. Equally, many minority ethnic people in Britain were deeply incensed when the BBC permitted recently the BNP leader Nick Griffin to speak on a program. They pointed out that the mainstreaming of racism will undoubtedly lead to an increase in racist violence. I wonder whether Professor Cooper fully appreciates the implications of her feeble attempt at denying the link between homophobic statements calling for violence against gays and lesbians and the occurrence of such violence.

Her last unsubstantiated claim is that fans potentially engaging in homophobic violence would not do so after dancing to artists' tunes encouraging them to kills gays and lesbians. Is she seriously suggesting that there might be people out there who were considering killing gays and lesbians and then these folks get prevented from doing this because they attend a concert with an artists calling on them to go through with their tentative plans? What can I say, this surely is a breathtaking empirical claim without any basis in fact.

So, there you go, now you know why us folks outside your island go out of our way to have your violence and art kept where it belongs, namely on your island - as your problem, not ours. Let Buju apologize for this song and we will welcome him with open arms.