Can anti-homosexuality issue win votes for MMD?

TERENCE MUSUKU
Correspondent | Tuesday August 2, 2011 00:00

The political leadership under President Rupiah Banda has put in motion a make-belief that opposition Patriotic Front (PF) leader Michael Sata is being funded by the West so that once elected president, he will legalise homosexuality in the country.

Zambia was declared a Christian nation, despite protests from other religious groups like Muslims and Hindus in the country, after MMD came to power in 1991.

So in the absence of a realistic election achievement with which to appease the people clamouring for change, the MMD chiefs have, as a result, mobilised a clique of 'political predators' to play up the purported homosexual issue to sway the voter.

The key players in the MMD cabal include political grovellers Gregore Chifire, the so-called Chanda Chimba 'The Third' and dismissed PF mavericks, General Secretary Edwin Lifwekelo, Charles Chimumbwa and Edward Mumbi.

But can the homosexuality issue win an election for any political formation anywhere in Africa, a continent still preoccupied with issues of widespread poverty, ignorance and disease?

Pundits and lettered minds have classified homosexuals in the psychopathic personality mental condition - a term given to anyone who has different standards of behaviour from those generally accepted by society.

Homosexuals are those who have what are regarded as peculiar sexual habits.  Found in human societies are also sadists and masochists who derive pleasure from inflicting pain upon others and those who derive pleasure from pain afflictioned upon them by others.

The homosexual scourge typically obtains in Occidental society, the Western world where indulgencies in permissive life, sleazy behaviour, moral decay, fornication, adultery, co-habitation, and morganatic marriage are deep-rooted. Put aptly, homosexuality has been and is still, a white man's bane. Penetration in Oriental society (Asian countries) and African and Arab regions of the world has been negligible.

However, since the whole world has become a melting pot, culturally, homosexuality has a looming possibility to leave no part of the world free from penetration.

Homosexuality, as most people now know, is and entails an attraction between individuals of the same sex. A majority of people pass through a brief homosexual stage psychologically termed as mid-summer madness.

Social scientists say ordinarily this comes just before puberty when schoolgirls develop fancy or romantic feelings for one another, or teachers and schoolboys have similar feelings towards each other or their heroes/heroines.

These dispositions, however, may be retained into adult life. In current times people take a much more tolerant view of homosexuality, accepting that what adults do (with consent) is their own business. They tend to think that a male homosexual who seduces a boy under age should be treated in no way different from a man who seduces an under age girl.

Male homosexual practices are no longer an offence in the Western world, if committed in privacy between consenting adults. Female homosexual practices have never been an offence.

Everyone understands that the world today is full of people who are different: there are those who are different in the right way, who should get satisfaction from their achievements, and there are those different in the wrong way, who should seek expert advice or psychopathic counselling.

In Britain prosecutions against male homosexuals in post Second World War years, led to the setting up of a Special Department Committee under Sir John Wolffnden to advise whether the law needed amendment.

In its report published in 1957, the committee recommended the abolition of penalties against consenting adult homosexuals indulging in privacy. Ultimately, after prolonged controversy for and against, a bill to this effect was passed in 1966.

Homosexuality is now legalised in both the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK). In Britain, moreover, homosexuality is not only tolerated, but virtually approved by their national Christian denomination - the Anglican Church - with no less than seven million followers worldwide.

But does an ordinary villager care whether homosexuality is banned in the country or not if he cannot send children to school because of poor roads or access health services.

So as polling day, September 20, approaches serious people in the country and probably elsewhere in the region are doubting whether the homosexuality issue will be an incentive to compel the voter - in a poor country where the vast majority still live on less than one US dollar per day - to retain the MMD for another five years. (Sila Press Agency)