Jamaican Christians, end your hypocrisy about sex

Colin Stewart is a 45-year journalism veteran living in Southern…

For Dwayne Morrison, the hypocrisy was too much to bear.

He decided to challenge Jamaica’s Christian fundamentalists’ silence about a new (heterosexual) sex scandal involving one of their own.

For years, those same Christian conservatives have remained hot and bothered about consensual same-sex relationships, including a massive protest two years ago, when the Rev. Richard Ho Lung and others addressed a huge crowd from a stage blocking the street at Half Way Tree.

Morrison wrote the following commentary in response to the Moravian Church scandal over the many sexual contacts that Pastor Rupert Clarke allegedly had with young women and girls as well as the people who failed to stop him.

By Dwayne Morrison

Where are the Bible-reading, gospel-preaching, tongues-speaking, Holy-Ghost-filled hypocrites? Where is the stage blocking Half Way Tree road? Where are the speakers of the “truth” of righteousness and of what is all pure?

The Rev. Richard Ho Lung (Photo courtesy of the Jamaica Observer)

Where is Father Richard Ho Lung and all the religious fundamentalists — elders, deacons, deaconesses, brothers and sisters — who came out and marched in protest of the innate rights of consenting adults of the same sex to express their love for each other? Where are you now to lament about the injustice that we have seen over and over again?

Is your silence because of the perpetrators’ “calibre” and/or their economic and political backing? You keepers of the “Word,” you saints, come out and raise your voice and be heard. You remain in silence while our nation’s children and women are being misused, abused and raped by the same persons who condemn these acts from their pulpits and pews.

“It seems to me that the only sin that is recognised and worthy of public condemnation in this day and age by the Church is homosexuality. Wow! What a tangled web we weave.

“O, what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side.”

Dwayne Morrison is an LGBT human rights advocate and peer educator at the non-governmental human service agency RISE Life Management Services in Jamaica.

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