Save us from from wishes of zealots

THE EDITOR, SIR:

IF press reports are correct, UPP leader, Antonnette Haughton de Cardenas, has called for a vice squad. While well-intentioned, this is a very dangerous proposal from the leader of a party seeking state office. Such views are reductionist and essentialist.

Despite what we may believe, not all Jamaicans are Christians, hence not all Jamaicans should have to subscribe to any code of decency that is preferred by any one religion or denomination to which they have no affiliation, or from which they have chosen to distance themselves.

In a plural society, as our motto suggests, the Bible cannot be our book of laws.

Furthermore, in a free society, which one hopes Jamaica is, people should have the right, provided they do not infringe the rights of their compatriots, to personal standards of decency.

The UPP must be careful that it does not fall into the trap that so many black nationalist organisations which, seeking to advance the cause of the development of black people, have fallen into, by lumping us all into a romantic monolith that exists only in the minds of their leaders.

Often the evangelical zeal with which such a universalising ideal is pursued and enforced is unrivalled by that of the Europeans who sought to conceal the nudity of Africans and Christianise them out of their debauchery and vulgarity that were so offensive to Europe's God.

On that score, Mrs. de Cardenas might well wish to re-read Frantz Fanon and/or Ngugi wa Thiongo. She might well find the language she uses strangely familiar to the ears of our ancestors.

Indeed, she might learn that the Christianity she claims as saviour, is the force from which Africa and her children most need to be saved!

I am etc

R. ANTHONY LEWIS

roanthony@yahoo.com

niversity of Montreal

Quebec, Canada

Via Go-Jamaica

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