Resist the apparent push by the West for gay rights

By Charles Kanjama

Inevitable’ is the fallacy of the intellectually dishonest. Or maybe it is the refuge of the intellectually lazy. Or sometimes the destination of false pragmatists. Because when you take a large and lucid view of human history, you discover that the only inevitable fact is the fact that no human development is inevitable. Simply due to a basic concept called human freedom, and an apparently bothersome ‘little’ detail called free will.

This basic concept of human freedom puzzles theologians and atheists alike. Theologians trouble to find the middle ground between a harsh predestination and a saccharine providence. Atheists worry in the black pit of despair, wondering how God can allow evil in the world and yet also be omnipotent, omniscient and infinitely good.

When I was younger, I was fascinated by a question I encountered in religion class. “If God is all powerful, can he make a stone that is too heavy for him to lift?” Similar to the question, ‘Can God make a square circle?’ the avid student would at once realise that it was a trick question that required a clever answer. And the standard answer was that a logical self-contradiction is a non-entity, hence cannot exist.

But there is a profound sense in which the answer to the question about the heavy stone is that God indeed did make a stone that was so heavy, or so precious, that he himself would not lift it. And that stone, of course, is human freedom. So the consequence of free will, namely choice, is the one inevitable thing; not any particular choice, but merely the fact that we can always choose.

True, bad habits may dull our ability to choose. Addictions may even kill our free will. But for as long as one heartbeat follows another, we can always choose. And this is the answer to those who counsel despair, or arrogantly give assurance of the direction of human development, in support of their pet social causes, whether gay rights, atheism or other perceived aspects of human progress.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who posited ‘the will to power’ of the Superman, who ironically declared two centuries ago that God was dead. And the greater irony, as noted by theologians and sociologists decades later, was that God and religion remained very much alive; only Nietzsche himself, driven to despair and eventually suicide, was most certifiably dead.

So we know that certain human development is not inevitable, save for those naive persons who believe that progress merely means, as G.K. Chesterton scoffed, that Thursday follows Wednesday. Last week Makau Mutua made a giddy yet misleading attack against Christians and other persons opposed to the gay agenda, loudly trumpeting, “The real estate on which homophobes stand is shrinking fast. Like racists, misogynists, sexists and assorted bigots, homophobes will soon become a loud and disgraced minority.

My response is simple. Makau Mutua deliberately or negligently misstates recent teachings of Pope Francis. He tendentiously accuses the Anglican clergy from the global South of being intolerant haters merely because they insist that Christian teachings cannot be watered down by political correctness. He mischievously misreads Kenya’s Constitution to push his gay agenda. And he trumpets the fallacy of inevitability either out of intellectual laziness or deliberate obfuscation.

The truth is, slavery was considered inevitable for the ‘inferior’ black race until courageous men like William Wilberforce said ‘No’. Colonialism was considered inevitable until rebellious men throughout the so-called benign empires resisted. And abortion, infanticide, sodomy and other such cultural practices were considered inevitable in the ancient Roman Empire until Christianity rose up and rebelled.

Most of Africa, including most of Kenya, recognises that the push for gay rights, the entire kit and caboodle of the LGBTI agenda, is the strongest front of a new Western cultural imperialism that we must resist. I will not say that we will succeed, or that we will fail. None of these outcomes is inevitable. What is inevitable, pace Makau’s fallacy of inevitability, is that we will have a chance to choose our own destiny through our individual and collective choices.

Count me on the side of a cultural sovereignty that respects our human values, which are not just African or Christian but also human and natural. Indeed, it is nature that abhors a culture which, to use a metaphor, chooses to pass drinking water through the sewerage channel. And it is nature, which will ultimately revenge, as impersonally and inevitably as the law of gravity, should we choose to ignore it.