If the rule of law is held in respect and each individual is to be assured the equality of its protection, the police will charge those in the mob who attacked the three young men outside the Monarch Pharmacy in Kingston's Tropical Plaza last Wednesday.

At the same time, those legislators on the parliamentary committee examining current legislation dealing with sexual offences should end the fudge and come to the conclusion that the State has no role in the bedrooms of consenting adults - whether male or female or a combination thereof.

These two issues are connected and, in a sense, mutually reinforcing. But the first point first. An angry mob outside the pharmacy kept the three men hostage inside, because they suspected the group, maybe because of behaviour or dress, to be homosexuals. The young men were eventually rescued by the police, but in the process were jostled. At least one was hit by a stone.

Such incidents are far less frequent than they used to be, but still happen even as the society, declared by some to be extreme in its homophobia, becomes more tolerant of alternative lifestyles. Our point is that they shouldn't happen at all; all victims of crime must be afforded equal protection under the law.

This is not to suggest that this newspaper either supports or endorses homosexual activity. What we support is the right of individuals, in a democratic society, to the lifestyles of their choice. When a state begins to decide such things and to give voyeurs the role of arbiters of decency and informers on behaviour, it poses a major risk to people's rights and freedoms. We should, in such circumstances, beware of the rise of the autocrats.

So, too, we should be wary of the populists who are dragged by prevailing sentiments rather than pursuing a leadership anchored in principle. What is emerging in the Jamaican Parliament is more in line with the former than the latter. So our legislators are hopping around like the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof so as to maintain buggery as an offence and thereby not appearing to legalise male homosexuality.

The legislators hope to achieve their ends by defining rape as an offence where the female is victim, rather than changing the law to make the offence gender neutral. Of course other sexual offences would be separately defined as such, and would be gender neutral - a construct aimed at preventing an interpretation that sex between consulting males is legal.

There is little value in such manoeuvring, in our view, other than to give the State the right to peep into people's bedrooms in search of what is not its business. If adult and consenting males choose to engage in homosexual sex, that ought to be their business - no matter what the rest of us believe about their lifestyle or behaviour. For it has little practical impact on the rest of the society, except for those consequences created by the stupidity of the law.

As we have said before, the only thing worse than creating bad policy is implementing it. Our legislators have done too much of both.

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