Commentary
The Cayman Ministers Associationtakes a stand
Rev. Nicholas J.G. Sykes
In the wake of the moveby the UK government to force the Cayman Islands and four otherof its overseas territories to lift the ban on homosexuality,through an order in council, Cayman Net News sought the reactionof the Cayman Ministers Association. We produce below the commentsof CMA's spokesman Rev. Nicholas J.G. Sykes, who is Secretaryof the association, and Rector of the Church of England.
This latest move by the UK government, Reverend Sykes says, hasless to do with ensuring the rights of homosexuals than it hasto do with Britain meeting its international obligations.
"The whole reason that Britain has is not any concern forany rights, except that it wants to be on the right side of theEuropean system -- in particular of the judicial decisions thatflow from being part of the European Union," Rev. Sykes notes.
"The wider thing that concerns the Cayman Islands is thefact that Britain has become, pretty much officially a countrythat is not governed by its own Parliament. It is now governedby the courts, or the judiciary because the laws that are nowin Britain are now subject to review and modification by unelectedbodies."
He noted that the judiciary and the European court system arenow in the position of sovereignity and that the court systemis not a national one, but increasingly in the modern world hasbecome an international system. "Certainly as far as Britainis concerned, it is a European system," Rev. Sykes says."So it follows quite clearly that Britain is not an independentcountry and the position that Cayman has found itself in, andinterestingly mirrors a historical situation that Cayman was inthe late 1900s and early part of the 20th century that the CaymanIslands were a dependency of Jamaica, while Jamaica of coursewas a colony of Britain.
"Well, now the situation that we have is that the CaymanIslands is a dependency of Great Britain, or what the White Paperwants to term an overseas territory, but is in fact more of adependent territory than we ever were before as is evidenced bythese orders in council."
According to Rev. Sykes, Britain itself is not now an independentcountry "but is itself being ruled by a wider system of lawthan what itself and its people mandate. History has repeateditself to a degree, that Cayman now is a dependency of somethingwhich itself is not independent."
The present situation "looks like a matter of sexuality butin fact is all part of a very much bigger set of issues that wehaven't even begun, most of us in the Cayman Islands, to address,"he says. "But we'd better, because it is going to haunt us.We had better start working on this."
Indeed, in a letter dated 10th August to Baroness Scotland, followingher visit here, Rev. Sykes pointed out that there remained inthe Cayman Islands "strong objections and opposition to manyof the proposals" (in the Partnership for Progress and Prosperity-- the White Paper).
"One of my own very serious concerns about this is that theChurches are going to be brought into an increasingly irreconcilableopposition to the State if these proposals go through, and thisis a condition quite foreign to the history of these Islands,in which the State and its Ministries have broadly conceived ofthemselves in Christian terms," he wrote.
"While homosexuality is the "presenting issue"that most concerns many people, and I think understandably andrightly so, I have tried to emphasise the principles as I seethem forming a basis for the local objections to the legal changesbeing proposed - or threatened.
"As a recent official statement has acknowledged, none ofthe Overseas Territories has responded positively to the demandin the White Paper for the legalising of consensual homosexualactivity between adults in private, a fact that draws the threatof the imposition of this change by your government."
The letter continued:
"When you were questioned about this matter here, you werereported as saying that just as it is necessary to deal with kindnessand understanding towards those who divorce and those who commitadultery, in spite of the fact that such actions can be held tobe seriously detrimental to children and to the society, it isequally necessary to deal with a similar kindness and understandingtowards people who conduct homosexual acts.
Just as an attitude of kindness resulted in a legalisation ofdivorce in most societies years ago, so it must now result ina legalisation of private homosexual acts. Your argument was indeedvery persuasive.
"However, a broader view of all the issues involved can reducethe persuasiveness of such an argument markedly. There are a numberof factors that should be borne in mind, including the following:-
"Societies have always differed in the degree of legal regulationthey have considered to be necessary to limit anti-social behaviour.To remove the capacity of a community which has had the privilegeand the responsibility of effective social self-regulation byimposing decrees that it considers to be foreign to its ethosis an extraordinarily oppressive act - and one that must be seento be directly contrary to the intention of eliminating the adjective"dependent" for territories such as ours.
"You strongly insisted that the British Government in itsproposals was thinking only of acts between consenting adultsin private. You said that this was not intended to affect childrenor legislation that proscribed public indecency, which could indeedbe strengthened. These assurances no doubt will have settled somepeople's doubts about the wisdom of this course of action. Forthe following reasons, however, in my view these assurances area cry of "Peace! peace!" where there is no peace.
"I would like to challenge you or anyone to name for me asingle society in which the legalising of consensual homosexualacts between adults in private has not opened up to the childrenof that society a door into that lifestyle, and occasioned a significantnumber to practise it that otherwise would not have done. Thereis no need for me in this letter to describe the influence uponchildren that is being exerted by this trend in the societiesof North America. One only has to think of what is happening in"modern" Britain. It is regularly projected in the mediaas a norm, couples practising it are adopting children, and yourown government has done its best to remove the attempts to limitits appearance as a norm in sex education classes (the Section28 controversy).
"Those who promote this lifestyle will argue that all thisis a good thing. However, that cannot be your argument, who havesought to assure us that the proposed legislative changes wouldnot bring such things about here. Apart from any other consideration,you will no doubt be informed of statistics showing the markedlylower life-span of those who are involved in such activity. Tobring about the promotion of such lifestyles is to cause peopleto die early, as well as to promote an activity that in healthterms is the unsafest sexual activity of all.
Whenever the changes that the British Government has in mind forus are brought into full effect, you will know as well as I dothat we will no longer have the capacity to limit the influenceof the trend, something that is clearly seen by the incapacityof the British Government to keep those who practise homosexualismout of the armed services, which was its own policy. As you know,that was overturned by the pronouncement of an extra-nationalcourt. It can fairly be said that from that moment Britain ceasedbeing an independent nation. Policies that have been predicatedupon the interests of the security of the nation were overruledby the demands of the Napoleonic atheistic legal system imposedupon the nation.
In atheistic systems relationships are expressible only in termsof law, but in Christian ethics, there is the range of dimensionsto relationships covered by the grace of God. This means thatit is possible, and indeed commanded (in Christian terms) to exercisea privilege and duty of care (divine love) towards those who areopposed to the common good. Even if we are at war with an enemy,we are commanded to love him, and however injurious we may understandthe homosexual lifestyle to be for a community, the command to"love our neighbour as ourselves" applies just as muchto those involved in that lifestyle as it does to anyone else.
"In exercising that care, some will see it more in termsof attempting to help the person involved to free himself fromthe lifestyle's shackles, like those helping alcoholics, whileothers will see the care in terms more of a ministry of forbearance,knowing that such a change does not come easily. Whatever thestate of the law in the community may be, there are such dimensionsof kindness and understanding that we not only can exercise but,more, are mandated to exercise.
But in an atheistic societal structure, such dimensions are irrelevant,and the only way of expressing "kindness and understanding",or any other relationship, is in a legal relationship. In sucha uni-dimensional world, loving one's enemy becomes an intrinsicimpossibility, because the only way of forming a relationshipof kindness and understanding with an enemy would be to removethe legal impediments by which the law declares his habitual actionsto be injurious to the common good - in other words, to declarethat he is no longer an enemy. Yet this would be clearly a seriousfaux pas because the legal impediments represent a declarationbased on a longstanding and objective reality, and are not formedby a subjective desire not to care for the persons involved.
"The legal impediments that are enacted in societies againsthomosexual acts represent the judgment that such actions are sufficientlyinjurious to the community to come under regulation and censure.It is clear that on the whole the Overseas Territories have madethat judgment and are at peace with it. In my view a very strongsupportive case indeed can be made for such a judgment, thoughit is not the purpose of this letter to enter this area. It wouldbe a faux pas for the Territories to remove these impedimentson the grounds you outline. For the British Government to imposethis change on the Overseas Territories would serve neither justicenor kindness and understanding, which we are through our presentChristian-based societal structure mandated to exercise. It wouldbe a form of oppression quite contrary to the expressed intentof the proposed removal of the name "Dependent" fromthe Territories.
The Way Forward
According to Rev. Sykes, Cayman's response to the latest UK actionhas been pointed to in a position paper put forward by the CaymanMinisters Association, which noted that there must be an opendiscussion and knowledge on the part of the people about the discussionbetween the politicians in government and the representativesof the British government.
"I think first of all that they (the people of the CaymanIslands) have to understand that there is no partnership, notunless you are shifting the meaning of the word in the languageand making the word partnership mean something it does not. Whenyou talk about orders in council being imposed, and then callingthat a partnership, you are... just using language to mean whateveryou want it to mean," he says
He argued that it would appear that the UK government" isgoing to get back at us and say if you don't want this then youhave to go independent."
Noting that independence is "opposed by the financial peoplein this country," Rev. Sykes added that, "if the politicalarrangements that we chose are going to take us into a situationthat is a new form of enslavement, into something that is definitelyharmful for the people of these islands then there are other thingsto consider."
"I'm not advocating independence," he said. "TheCMA does not advocate any political position like that; in fact,as the Rector of the Church of England I would be very sad tosee the outcome of this as political independence and would hopeto see that we in the Cayman Islands can do something to rescuethe mother country out of the morass in which it has found itself.That may sound crazy, but God is greater than we can understand,"he stated.
He noted that other considerations, outside of independence include"delaying tactics" to implementing the new measures"until the next general election in Britain."
"We've got to get the communication lines open to a widerset of people than the present foreign office and all the peoplewho are being sent down here." This wider audience shouldinclude the opposition in Britain, Rev. Sykes notes.
Locally, the CMA will be arranging an early meeting with the newgovernment to discuss these issues, Rev. Sykes said.