gays have no business fighting for recognition

By Habel J. Nyamu (The Nation)

September 28, 2007: Disability is a condition adjudged to be significantly impaired, relative to the general standard of normal human beings' ability to perform different bodily or mental functions.

Thus, the blind, the deaf, and those without some, or all limbs, qualify as people with disability. The mentally handicapped are, likewise, regarded as people with disability.

In both cases, Kenyans have been cautioned, and they have graciously accepted, that disability of physical and mental conditions is not necessarily inability.

Conditions of physical disability may have their sources in accidents during war and peace. Other sources may be disorders or diseases which affect a person's thought processes and perception of reality as to render their performance significantly impaired, relative to what their performance would have been had they not suffered from those disorders.

THUS, ON THE WHOLE, DISABILITY could be defined as a condition which involves anomalies, defects, loss of limb or other deviation from generally accepted population standards, such as learning and application of knowledge, performance of tasks, mobility, self-care, communication, hearing, sight and speech.

Recently, Nairobi experienced the presence of a world conference known as the World Social Forum. It was during this forum that some Kenyans learnt with horror that there were gay Kenyans and lesbians living and practising habits which amount to anomalies, defects, or other significant deviations from generally accepted population standards.

It was at that forum that Kenyan gays and lesbians were reported as seeking recognition. The writer's concern is whether they were seeking recognition to be let free as gays and lesbians, or as people with disability.

If we were to embrace the definitions suggested above, then the answer to the ambivalent request for recognition can only be the latter option - recognition as persons suffering from a social disability since their condition has come about because of embracing, or (as they argued) having been born with significant deviations from generally accepted norms and standards for general populations.

It was surprising that instead of appealing for social counselling, like that available to other people with disability, they demanded involvement in politics and in social policy formulation.

One hopes that such involvement would not include their being allowed to change or influence the beliefs of Kenyans about gay practices.

The writer would like to believe that these habits were generally not known, in traditional African societies until after independence when free interaction between the West and Africa became more intensive than it was before.

This subject is clouded with mysterious unknowns as to whether these people were born the way they live, or simply succumbed to persuasion from Western practitioners through some reward like money. In either case, they suffer from social disability by reason of practising anomalies or other significant deviations from generally accepted standards.

Gay life, lesbianism, bisexualism and trans-sexualism have been non-African since time immemorial.

What could have taken place among Kenyans to make them even listen to things which, only a few years ago would have led to such people being subjected to the healing powers of the witchdoctor, if not being forthrightly outlawed by their families for unorthodoxy?

As to the audacity of imagining they could seek equality, one imagines that the kind of equality they may have in mind is one of equality of opportunity which, if the guarantor was the writer, would be denied, and even that which they may have earned before, withdrawn.

Even assuming that Kenyan gays, lesbians and other deviants may have been born with such tendencies, the average Kenyan is capable of taking us through the contents of the Bible or the Qur'an, which contain similar teachings as those intended to come from parental and/or societal socialisation. But because our interaction with the West has led to some of us embracing gross godlessness, they have become godless without caring.

These deviants have no business pretending that they do not know about the existence of a miraculous intelligence responsible for life and orderliness on earth and in the universe.

"Order" or the "purpose" of creation have the same meaning. If these deviants can reproduce but merely defy this responsibility just to be different, then their place, in my view, is not Kenya, or even Africa.

They belong where godlessness has been legalised to the extent that gays and lesbians are allowed to convert themselves into husbands and wives of the same sex.

Mr Nyamu is a commissioner with the Electoral Commission of Kenya