I have got a lot of hate mail in recent times about my stance on gays being afforded equal human rights in this country, and I think I am going to get a lot more after this latest salvo. Recently, the US Supreme Court ruled that gay men and women have the right to be married, opening the door for same-sex couples in all 50 states to have legitimate unions and will be afforded the same rights as traditional married couples.

Of course, conservatives and their far-right nutcases are up in arms. One clergyman said he was going to set himself alight in protest. I am still waiting on him to do that.

Posts resigned

Others have resigned their posts because they do not want any part of marrying same-sex couples. Here in Jamaica, the reaction has been similar. There have been memes of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller with someone having a gun to her head with a voice bubble saying, "If you eva ..." while people are saying that bestiality and paedophilia will be the next things to be legalised. Of course, there are the usual cries that these are the 'end of days' and all that crap.

Now, I know that people have a hard time accepting change, but I don't understand when people say that this is the end of marriage as we know it. I don't see how same-sex couples will somehow prevent traditional marriages from existing. All of a sudden, marriage has taken on an elevated level of sanctity.

The same people who are against same-sex marriages have no problem with a woman marrying a man solely for his money, or marrying to get a visa or some other material benefit. Where is the sanctity then? When a man takes unto himself as many wives as he can afford, doesn't that go against the one-man-to-one-woman argument?

We have been socialised to believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. And that's fine. If one tells the same story year after year after year then, over time, it becomes truth. So we believe this idea of marriage to be truth because we have been sold the idea over generations.

Savage TIMES

But what is the science behind it? For example, when man walked around in loin cloths and roamed across Africa and Europe, when we were savages; did we need marriage to propagate? Back then, I believe , as it is now in many cases, one man could impregnate thousands of women if he so desired. So, in reality, marriage is just a social construct that can evolve over time.

Look, change is never easy to accept, especially when that change requires the breaking of what we have been sold as religious moral values. It is against that background that I understand the resistance to same-sex marriages. But the problem, when we say those marriages will bring about the end of mankind as we now know it is rubbish.

Same-sex couples will make up less than 10 per cent of the world's marriages. That means overwhelming majority will be traditional marriages. What this means is that the world will continue to exist and, if it is destroyed, it won't be because two men or two women decide to live together and be afforded the same rights as traditional married couples.

If this world is to be destroyed, it will be because of man's continued ignorance and greed that has been doing more harm to this planet than anything else. The heat we feel in Jamaica today, for example, has nothing to do with same-sex couples. It has more to do with excess levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that trap heat that normally would have found its way up and out of the atmosphere. It's because we are killing our trees that use that CO2. It's because we are destroying our coral reefs and so on, not because of gay people wanting to get married.

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