No To Sodomy And Other Sexual Ills

| Monday December 3, 2007 00:00

The inference that can be drawn is that the BDP, by abiding to the constitutional dictate on presidential terms, has yet to develop impudence and an aversion for the nation's will and desire.

Furthermore, this demonstrates its positive outlook underlined by its determination to ensure the continuance of the respect and observance of the rule of law and its corollary of democracy in Botswana. Moreover, the BDP takes seriously its inalienable duty to jealously protect the foresight our forbearers had to plant the seeds of peace and stability we enjoy today and we are envied for the world over.

The BDP is however disappointed by ugly insinuations of its involvement in a systematic, deliberate and disingenuous ploy to impoverish the masses supposedly as a strategy of holding onto the reigns of power. Such talk is at best bizarre and spurious. Nevertheless, it remains humbled and honoured by the narrow majority of our people who are satisfied with its performance, confident in its rule and who believe in its vision for a better and prosperous nation. Furthermore, the BDP is cognisant of the need to continually better itself in all respects as a means to improving its ability to satisfactorily serve and to increasing the numbers of those among our people it can confidently count as having fairly earned their favour and trust. To achieve these ends, it is essential for the BDP to carry out a comprehensive assessment of itself to establish its current relationship with and mandate to the populace. Specifically it needs to make a reconsideration of its commitment to the largest constituency of our population, namely, the working class and gauge its responsiveness to their needs.

The BDP needs to urgently rediscover its founding interest and empathy for the plight of the working class that originally distinguished it from other political parties and in the progress dispel manifesting concerns that there is scant sign of these qualities in the party at present. The challenges it faces to meet the socio-economic needs of the working class notwithstanding, the BDP cannot afford to be seen to be lacking in its ability to provide satisfactory moral leadership to the working class. Critically, it must not fail to satisfy the overwhelmingly proletarian expectation to reject outright new emerging values inimical to the ideals of communal moral responsibility and human solidarity such as those espoused by the gay and prostitution subcultures. Accordingly, the BDP must continue to exhibit intolerance towards sanctimonious voices of mainly of the urban dwellers, bourgeoisie and the aristocracy that seek to ingrain self-righteousness, subjectivity, relativism and acute liberalism into our nation psyche.

The BDP's greatest duty is to remain in conformance with the will of the majority and reject persuasions, ideas and proposed laws that are anomalous to our culture and moral fabric such as the UK's Human Tissues and Embryo's Bill. This particular Bill gives both women in a lesbian relationship and not necessarily a civil partnership, the legal status of parents when one of them gives birth following fertility treatment. It further disqualifies or prohibits any man, such as the sperm donor, to be treated as the father, ostensibly to avoid a child having three legal parents. This Bill essentially permits a lesbian couple to interchangeably ''mother'' and ''father'' a child and regards a father as an optional extra that will bring about legal complications for the child and thus is best excluded!

Generally, the BDP must vigilantly guard against its governance being at variance with popular opinion as a result of the peddling of ideas by those with the means but who might not necessarily understand or care about our people's ethos and values. It must ignore accusations and claims that it is sexually oppressing the masses and resist exhortations for it to jump on to the bandwagon that seeks to exploit euphemism to make immoral and unnatural acts more socially acceptable. With intergenerational sex and incest fast gaining favour in the West and both routinely referred to as perfectly natural and consensual, the BDP government must expect these lewd acts to be marketed here as viable sexual orientations in the not so distant future and must be ready to reject them outright and without any compromise.

Thero T. Gaadingwe
Gaborone