The Tribune

A RELATIVE recalls a solemn service at Westminster Abbey in London, one of the United Kingdom’s and the Church of England’s most prestigious religious edifices. A Royal Particular, the Abbey is directly responsible to the British Sovereign, the head of the Church. It is the site of coronations since William the Conqueror in 1066.

The sermon was delivered by the Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu. Before he began to preach, the five-foot-four diminutive figure of this moral giant let out a loud, “Yippee”, which reverberated throughout the church, with a seating capacity of 2000.

The relative’s clear impression was the irrepressibly spirited and gregarious Archbishop was simultaneously expressing his joy, while somewhat mocking the British establishment that defended and bolstered the vicious apartheid regime in South Africa that was then crumbling.

Here was a black son of the continent preaching at the religious heart of an empire that had enslaved millions and raped many countries of identity, natural resources and dignity.

Archbishop Tutu was not awed by human power or conceit, whether political, economic, religious/clerical or tribal. He was willing to confront every human institution and mindset which offended human dignity, including at times the African National Congress.

In remembering him, British author and journalist Andrew Harding described, “the clarity of his moral fury”. It was an ethic and a passion for justice rooted in a profound Christian anthropology and vision of human dignity and equality.

A clerical associate of many years insists Archbishop Tutu had only one homily which he repeated through near endless examples, metaphors and analogies: all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.

The Archbishop typically added “beautiful” before the word “image”. He believed in the radical dignity of the human person, which inspired his rainbow vision and ethic of love and fixed and steadied his moral compass.

The rainbow is a symbol in many traditions and movements. It is seen as a covenant or sign of God’s promise for a new beginning. The nuclear non-proliferation movement rallied under the rainbow flag as a banner of peace.

It is a symbol of equality and diversity, including for the gay rights movement and others. Some indigenous peoples have used it as a symbol of inclusion.

For Archbishop Tutu it was a powerful symbol and sign of the diversity and magnificence of God’s beautiful and marvellous creation, a promise, a beacon of hope for the marginalized, including those suffering from racial, economic, gender and sex discrimination.

As the political bulwarks and ramparts of apartheid fell, Archbishop Tutu and others envisioned a rainbow nation, symbolized in the national flag and entrenched in the national constitution.

Section 10 of the South African Constitution’s Bill of Rights states: “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.”

The Constitution prohibits discrimination on various grounds but specifically lists: “race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.” A distinction is made between gender and sex as well as between race and colour.

This was the first constitution in the world to list sexual orientation in its non-discrimination clause, for which the Archbishop assiduously lobbied. A decade after the 1996 Constitution, South Africa became the sixth nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

One Anglican bishop who was among many who decried the former’s stance on gay and transgender rights once declared Archbishop Tutu as “spiritually dead”. How did a South African Episcopal cleric in a conservative country on a mostly socially conservative continent become so committed to equality for all?

His commitment to the dignity, equality and full rights for gays and lesbians was a part of his seamless and consistent ethic of love, dating back to the 1970s, when such views were even more unpopular. His ethic of equality was concomitant with his commitment to racial and economic justice and respect for other religions.

For Desmond Tutu, God was a Creator and a community of love. We are each of us, individually, uniquely, wonderfully, beautifully made in God’s image and likeness.

And because Christians believe in a triune God, we are also collectively made in the image of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a community of love. We are all a part of what Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired by others, described as the “beloved community”.

Soon after the end of apartheid in 1994, Desmond Tutu, the champion of the intimate companions of justice and love, declared: “If the church, after the victory over apartheid, is looking for a worthy moral crusade, then this is it: the fight against homophobia and heterosexism.”

He was attuned and sensitive to how all power structures may offend human dignity, including the oppression of women and the oppression of gays and lesbians. He famously stated that he “would rather go to hell than to a homophobic heaven”.

The Archbishop unambiguously - and to the annoyance of many - equated racial and sexual equality, demanding that one cannot argue morally and intellectually for the rights of one group of people while denying equality to others.

This moral equation has been supported by a variety of civil rights champions, including the late Coretta Scott King and the late Representative John Lewis, who decried the 1996 Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the US in the face of tremendous opposition.

Lewis thumped:

“This bill is a slap in the face of the Declaration of Independence. It denies gay men and women the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Marriage is a basic human right.

“You cannot tell people they cannot fall in love. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say when people talked about interracial marriage and I quote: ‘Races do not fall in love and get married. Individuals fall in love and get married’.

Speaking on Mr Lewis’s sponsorship of pro-gay rights legislation and his championing of these rights for decades, activist Victoria Kirby York noted:

“When you’ve stared death in the face solely because of the colour of your skin, it gives you a different view of justice.” She was referring to his brushes with death during the civil rights struggle in the United States.

The gay anti-apartheid activist Simon Nkoli participated in the liberation from apartheid and homophobia in South Africa. He stated:

“I am black and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts of me into secondary or primary struggles. In South Africa, I am oppressed because I am a black man and I am oppressed because I am a gay man. So, when I fight for my freedom I must fight against both oppressions. … All those who believe in a democratic South Africa must fight against all oppression, all intolerance, all injustice.”

An article on The Conversation website rooted the Archbishop’s theology of human equality and dignity. It is from “an abbreviated version of a chapter on Archbishop Tutu in the book Reimagining Christianity and Sexuality in Africa, co-authored by Adriaan van Klinken and Ezra Chitando.”

The writers note:

“In the 1980s, Tutu and other Christian leaders had used the concept of ‘heresy’ to denounce apartheid in the strongest theological language. They famously stated that ‘apartheid is a heresy’, meaning that it is in conflict with the most fundamental Christian teaching.

“Tutu also used another strong theological term: blasphemy, meaning an insult of God-self. In 1984, he wrote: ‘Apartheid’s most blasphemous aspect is … that it can make a child of God doubt that he is a child of God. For that reason alone, it deserves to be condemned as a heresy.’

“More than a decade later, Tutu used very similar words to denounce homophobia and heterosexism. He wrote that it was ‘the ultimate blasphemy’ to make lesbian and gay people doubt whether they truly were children of God and whether their sexuality was part of how they were created by God.”

An inveterate local letter-writer cum bigot has been consistently narrow-minded and driven by perverse heterosexism and injustice in denying the dignity of gays and lesbians. Here is the latest example, which Archbishop Tutu would guffaw and easily dismantle.

The letter-writer stated: “Decrying opposition to homosexuality, Tutu conflated mere opposition rooted in love to hatred of gay people. In reality, however, not every form of discrimination is bad.

“For instance, no right-thinking parent would entrust their children to a known paedophile; nor would a sane woman feel comfortable sleeping in the same room with a known serial rapist. Anglicans know that God loves sinners.”

This is not opposition rooted in love. By conflating homosexuality with paedophilia, a well-worn trope that has been discredited, the writer is again suggesting gays and lesbians are mostly paedophiles, ignoring the fact that paedophiles may be straight or gay.

It is a perverse conflation on his part. Imagine a gay couple ignorantly and stupidly stating they would not leave one of their children with a straight person, with the inference that most straight people are paedophiles.

The other inference is that gays and lesbians are like rapists. This is not love in opposition. This is a perverse, sickening and disgraceful mindset by someone who seeks to demonize an entire class of people, breezily likening them to paedophiles and rapists.

This is similar to the white supremacists who characterized all black people in the most insidious and racist manner. Throughout much of slavery black men were described as inherently rapists, ignorant, slothful, barely human.

The letter-writer seems to have borrowed a mindset from such a cesspool of ignorance and hatred, who has his favourite forms of discrimination.

Archbishop Tutu counselled believers to pray for the oppressors and the bigots. He would urge us to pray for the conversion of the homophobes and bigots who would pen such a graceless and tasteless attack on the fundamental dignity of God’s gay sons and daughters.

And he would invite us all to keep working to bend the arc of justice in the fashion that the rainbow bends and blesses all of humanity equally as children made individually and collectively in the beautiful image of God, who loves and graces his beautiful and wonderfully-made gay sons and daughters.