For God's Sake

I wrote the following article and I have sent it to a Humanist magazine but as I have heard nothing I thought I'd put it on the blog.

[Background: Nigeria's government is moving ahead with legislation to ban same-sex marriages, with five years in jail for anyone who has a gay wedding or officiates at one. Homosexual sex is already illegal and in the north offenders can be stoned. The AFP news agency reported Justice Minister Bayo Ojo as having said the law would also ban "any form of protest to press for rights or recognition".
With support and leadership from Archbishop Peter Akinola, the head of Nigeria's Anglican Church and other religious leaders there is now a nexus of inhumanity, a conclave of reactionary political and religious forces, pressing for laws which will flout and thereby undermine the international consensus on human rights.
Mr Leo Igwe, Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Humanist Movement is one of a small number of courageous Nigerian voices speaking out in protest. This protest will soon be illegal in Nigeria.]

For God's Sake
I have some very religious friends. They would agree with “do not kill”. Of course what they mean is do not murder, do not kill illegally.
I am an atheist but of course I know there is a ‘God’. God is an amazing character conceived of the human imagination. God, like many other fictional characters, can have great impact on the actions of people, for it is through stories of the imagination that ideas are conveyed.

Maybe you think you understand killing and murdering? It isn’t so simple. You need to define death, you need to understand cause and effect. You can kill someone quickly. You can kill someone slowly.

My mother shortly before her death wanted to tell me about something that had happened to her a long time ago. She told me that my brother, a few years older than me brought home a friend from school. A fair-haired boy with eyes that shone intelligently. A neighbour told my mother that this boy was not quite normal. She said he was ‘other’. She said: ‘you know, not like other boys, not attracted to girls.’ My mother was in a panic. This was in the early 1960s in England when homosexuality was still illegal. What to do? She told me she consulted a neighbour, a tall broad-shouldered man, someone with standing in the community. He told my mother that this boy, with the intelligent eyes, must be shunned, must be spurned, must be made not to associate with my brother, her son, his neighbour. My mother remained silent. ‘Don’t worry’, said the neighbour, a kind man, ‘I’ll see to it. I’ll have a quiet word with the boy and his parents. They won’t bother you again.’ My mother held back her tears. ‘This is one of the things that I have done in my life of which I am the most ashamed. I stood aside and allowed a terrible injustice. I am so sorry.’
She told me she didn’t know what had happened to the boy. She never saw him again.

What has this to with killing, with murdering? Such ‘gentle’ deeds are but the first steps towards murder. All unjustified discrimination, all racism, all persecution of minorities, all standing to one side: allowing the pogroms, allowing the genocides, allowing the destruction of opportunity is to kill that which is the essence of life – growth and development.
I weep for all those great women; doctors, philosophers, artists, writers, politicians, scientists and the rest who, but for prejudice, would have been; for all those men and women who, once labelled this or that, have been (and are still being) conveyed to their deaths by machete, or poison gas, or machine gun, or just stunted in their growth and who die more slowly but with their potential murdered just as if their heads had been torn from their shoulders

Right now, and not for the first time, our fellow human beings, fearful of the wrath which is visited on murderers, wish to transform by sleight of hand immoral and barbarous murder, murder of hope, murder of life, murder of opportunity to legalised butchery, to excision and extirpation. Following centuries of horror, human beings from all this planet’s lands consented and assented, in the middle of the last century, to the notion of inalienable human rights. We are among an unimaginable number of people. We are more than six billion on this globe. This international understanding seeks to sanctify, to make precious, the value of all of us, all of us as individuals. People like Mr Leo Igwe in Nigeria along with others are bravely determined, once again, not to stand aside when the threat to transform heinous injustices to legal acts hangs heavy in the air.
Each and everyone of us who is in pain, or who watches such suffering in our parents, in our children, in our friends and neighbours think now that someone who might develop the cure, a sweet balm to all these troubles, is at this very moment having their youth soured, is being prevented from growing and developing to achieve their potential. We must not stand idly by.
I thank you Leo, and all those who speak up with such courage.I thank you for not standing aside.

END

Josh Kutchinsky is an active Humanist. He is treasurer of the Hampstead Humanist Society, member of the British Humanist Association, American Humanist Association and National Secular Society, supporter of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.