Home  News Regional News Caribbean urged to repeal buggery law
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Caribbean urged to repeal buggery law |
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Written by Desmond Brown
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Monday, 17 November 2008 |
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Page 1 of 2 MONTEGO BAY - Two and a half decades after it was branded "the gay plague", AIDS is again taking a toll on certain vulnerable groups within the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), one of them being men who have sex with men.
Globally, homosexual and bisexual men are 19 times more likely to contract HIV than the rest of the population and data released at the 8th Annual General Meeting of the Pan Caribbean Partnership Against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP) in October shows that in this part of the world, the HIV prevalence among that group is very high.
While data was not available for every member country, the available statistics showed the Bahamas with a prevalence rate of 8.2 percent in 2007; Cuba - 5.2 percent in 1988 and 0.86 percent in 2007; Guyana – 21 percent in 2006; and Jamaica – from 9.6 percent in 1988 to 31.8 per cent in 2007.
When AIDS first appeared in the 1980s, the mystery virus was labeled as being a homosexual disease.
Stirred on by the rapid deaths of many of their friends, gay leaders took action by mounting prevention campaigns at the community level. Their efforts paid off, as HIV infections among gay and bisexual men fell dramatically for a decade.
But officials say the data showing HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men prove that the early lessons of the AIDS epidemic have been forgotten in the Caribbean and the time has come for the region to take what could be the boldest step yet in fighting the disease - repealing of buggery laws.
Cuba, the Caribbean country with the lowest HIV prevalence among gay men, does not have a buggery law, while The Bahamas repealed the Buggery Act in the early 1990s.
With precedent already set in the Caribbean, a leading Jamaican health official says it is time for the rest of the region follow suit.
"Any lawyer worth their salt will tell you that the Buggery Act is just a very poor piece of legislation and needs to be repealed; and someone has to take the initiative on this," Head of Epidemiology and AIDS in the Ministry of Health in Jamaica, Dr. Peter Figueroa told nearly 200 delegates at the PANCAP meeting.
The health official cautioned social advocates, who mainly want gay acceptance and religious groups that oppose legalizing homosexuality, that his motive was based primarily on a public health perspective.
"I want to emphasize that we are not discussing this from a moral view point," Figueroa said.
"We are respecting whatever views there are concerning the morality of it. We are looking at it from a public health perspective, affirming the human rights of people to choose their sexuality and also recognizing that this will help to reduce the spread of HIV."
But in a region where Christianity is the dominant religion, the majority public opinion is that the practice of men having sex with men is abominable. Christians usually point to the biblical story where God destroyed an entire city, Sodom and Gomorrah, because of the gay lifestyles of the inhabitants.
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