By: Arthur J. van Nel
This is part one of a 3-part series of my contribution to the heightened discourse captioned above. In the second part, I’ll illuminate my views on the rights of homosexual people as juxtaposed against children’s rights, and in the final installment, I’ll unpack my views on the subject as framed through the prism of Scripture.
During the early 2000’s I was part of a team of Organisational Development practitioners working in Lesotho on an assignment of public sector institutional review and enhancement. I was astounded to hear from the civil servants I interacted with daily, about the low opinion they held of Mzansi and her citizens. They accused us of, inter alia, behaving like a big brother, interfering in the domestic affairs of sovereign nations on the continent, arrogance, and a litany of other unsavoury transgressions. It seemed to escape most of them that, despite them despising us, on average, they studied here, hoped to immigrate here, and pursued careers and opportunities in our country. The USA probably understand this perplexing feeling better, that those who despise them nonetheless queue at their borders, desperate for citizenship, without the slightest conviction of hypocrisy.
“Xenophobia” is now a firmly established phenomenon, however uncritical and under-engaged its application, and used often with random abandon to characterise any South African who dares to criticise our porous borders or the sustainability of multitudes of daily increasing undocumented foreign nationals or even documented foreigners who are employed in droves in especially agriculture, hospitality and construction.
Paradoxically though, no term exists to describe the dislike, prejudice, or even hatred that foreign nationals may harbour toward us. Put a different way, this is a manifestly uneven playing field wherein the hatred for foreigners can be expressed in a word while no word exists to express their prejudice and hatred towards the host country and her citizens.
Is the subtle inference to be drawn that the only party capable of hate resides in the host country? Are immigrants incapable of hating? Certainly, this preposterous notion could never be sustained where rational thought is the premise for the conversation.
It occurred to me recently that the easily bandied-about characterizations such as “homophobic”, “anti-gay” and “queerphobia” don’t have equal terminology in respect of gay people. Firstly, I’m disturbed by the intellectual laziness to attribute these accusations without explaining the meanings or why the accused has fulfilled the requirements implicit in the accusation. Certainly, it can’t be enough to arbitrarily paint anyone with such epithets without substantiating, say, what thoughts, comments or behaviour qualifies one as anti-gay. Secondly, are we to surmise from that unequal application of “anti” that gay people are inherently incapable of dislike, prejudice, disapproval, or hatred of heterosexual people? Why was no homosexual person ever accused of being anti-straight and why doesn’t “homophobia” has a counter description for gay people who dislike straight people?
When I commenced with writing this article, my introduction consisted of 3 disclaimers, in which I was at pains to explain that I am neither homophobic nor suffer from toxic masculinity. Sanity prevailed on me and I deleted that sterile and apologetic interlude to my sincere, though firm, expression of my convictions, which I’m fully persuaded of. The shocking realisation dawned on me that I have been subtly bullied by the distorted, venomous, and demonising nature in which gay people generationally engage in any debate concerning them, at least in my view. The backlash is severe, the name-calling vicious and character assassination trumps any pretense of interrogating or rebutting fair and substantial arguments. I consider myself – and I’m certain those who know me may concur – a bold person, able to postulate without fear my deeply held convictions. If I, a bold person, a public speaker, and a school and university debating champion, felt successfully bullied, to the extent that I was overcome by an inhibiting paralysis of fear of retribution, how many millions of heterosexual people have been silenced, not because they don’t hold strong views, but they have been bullied effectively into silence? And add to these relentless smear campaigns the damaging and protracted litigation in the equality court that could ruin a reputation, even if you prevail.
Heterosexual people appear to have been painted as universally stupid, unloving, bereft of understanding, incapable of tolerance, archaic in their worldview, and just not getting it. So when we argue that the same constitution that guarantees any homosexual person all basic human rights also limits those rights as weighed against the rights of others in exercising those very rights. An example given is the right of my heterosexual minor child to not participate in any imposed curriculum reform that subjects him in school to homosexual content that may suggest he may require it to aid his non-existent journey of exploration of his sexual orientation. Why it’s assumed that he’s on some exploration journey is beyond me. My 13-year-old son has neither expressed any confusion with his sexual orientation nor did he intimate that he requires support to clarify such non-existent confusion.
Again, to ask genuinely and non-judgementally if the rights of children are considered when permitting their adoption by homosexual parents – who, evidently – can’t produce the very children they wish to adopt – doesn’t render us unloving or hateful. It makes us engaged and concerned. Throwing insulting slurs is as unintellectual as it is violence visited on millions of well-meaning people, whose love for gay people is not mutually exclusive to exercising their right to differ with a plethora of issues.
Celebrating and advancing LGBTQ+ rights – which are enshrined in the constitution and therefore protected – are not an issue in a constitutional democracy such as ours. Millions of heterosexual people have children and parents and siblings and extended family and neighbours and colleagues who are openly gay and to whom they show nothing but love and tolerance. To therefore raise legitimate debates around school curriculum, shared toilets, quotas in an appointment and unchallenged dominant narratives advanced and then to be brutalized by backlashes of ultra-liberal academics and human rights practitioners is just rude. Much of the willful misunderstanding and mischievous character innuendo is meant solely to obfuscate and prevaricate the truth.
Gay people themselves may have become the embodiment of the very intolerance they are struggling against.
If Woolworths feel compelled to align with the pride campaign, which is its right, why is the argument that it never aligned with the land or economic transformation or Africa Day or Passover campaigns or celebrations to be trampled upon by casting aspersions – rather than answer the criticism – on those raising these valid angles in interrogating Woolworths’ expedient corporate choices.
The framing of any debate concerning the LGBTQ+ community is fundamentally skewed toward anyone who holds a different view. The microphone has been sterilised to amplify only the carefully curated narrative that the ultra-liberal media and poorly advised politicians advanced for expediency as they succumb to the temptation to look and sound lit and woke and politically correct. A friend of one of my daughters shared with me personally about her exposure to and involvement in lesbianism during her teenage years, which she quit a few years ago. She told me about how widespread violence is in lesbian relationships, courtesy of intense jealousy. Interesting that talk show hosts, academics, and newsrooms don’t pursue and report on the intricacies of these dynamics. This allows us to continue to understand violence in the context of heterosexual couples only, deplorable and endemic as it undoubtedly is.
Heterosexual people have been bullied into submission to self-imposed censorship that we can’t even question the education department’s unwavering obsession to expand curriculum and institute mass-based “counseling” of foundation phase learners whereas the real crisis they should have been seized with is the national calamity that 82% of grade 6 learners can’t read for meaning, rendering them functionally illiterate. Further, in 3 000 public schools the ablution facilities are still pit latrine toilets. How’s that for bad policy and budget prioritisation? But raising these contradictions attracts a default branding as a hater of gay people.
Has it occurred to anyone that heterosexual people have already come out, to borrow a phrase from the LGBTQ+ community? We came out since our childhood to live our sexual creation as opposed to
exploring our orientation. To campaign in a manner that suggests heterosexual people are straight only because they haven’t explored their orientation is manifestly stupid and grossly insulting.
It’s not too much to ask to be left alone and be given space to organise our lives in line with our sexual orientation convictions about our sexual attraction to the opposite gender. Bombarding us with tv series, movies, radio talk shows, print media, and social media platforms while closing down the space for critical engagement is macabre. And this bullying must seize with immediate effect.
In this country, Independence is many times understood to mean independence from the government only. So low is that bar that an editor, academic, analyst, or commentator only has to be critical of the government to be deemed uncaptured. Whether that very tv news channel, newspaper, university, editor, or analyst is captured by corporate or other vested interests and reproduces scripted opinions, is not a factor. Similarly, more and more the litmus test to be deemed “progressive” appears to be uncritical alignment with advancing homosexuality. If that’s your outlook, then you’re considered modern, enlightened, and progressive.
We may be heading into a future where heterosexual people will be expected to explain why they’re so backward to live according to the design of their bodies.
*Arthur J. van Nel
Entrepreneur & Social Justice Activist
What two consenting adults Have chosen to do isn’t anyone’s business.