Yardie Skeptic Movie Review: "Sex, Lies and Rights"

Title: "Sex, Lies and Rights"
Producer/Director: Jamaica Coalition for Healthy Society
Length: 54 mins
Genre: Propaganda
Batshit rating: 6 out of 5 buckets (not a typo)


Every now and again you come across something on the internet which forces you to ask yourself "what the fuck did I just watch?" You wonder to yourself, or perhaps even loudly at the computer screen, how it is that persons could so freely and enthusiastically put their stupidity on display for the entire world to access at the click of a button. When you come across material like this you're instantly struck by the harrowing reality that there are persons out there who take this sort of stuff as unquestionably true. Such is my reaction to the recently produced DVD "Sex, Lies and Rights" by the Jamaica Coalition for Healthy Society (JCHS).

The DVD features an amateur produced "documentary" designed to sensitize (actually scare) the Jamaican public about the apocalyptic dangers of repealing the buggery law found in the Offences Against the Person Act. The JCHS essentially believes that allowing gay persons, men in particular, to have consensual sex would detonate a time bomb causing Jamaica to spiral into a hell-hole of sexual depravity, spiritual anarchy, legal upheaval, and all round societal meltdown. If gay men are allowed to fuck, we all get screwed. Surprisingly, the production was launched with much fanfare at a cinema in Kingston; not surprisingly the attendees included members of the homophobic top brass of Jamaica.

The entire feature is a celebration of fear-mongering and misrepresentation of the facts: it starts out with misconceptions of biblical proportions - human rights are granted by "God," and ends with nonsensical assertions about what is best for ALL Jamaicans - the Judeo-Christian worldview is the "safest" one for persons to "thrive." The film is divided into three main sections; a skit involving two males pretending to be students of philosophy, and then one monologue a piece from Dr. Wayne West (chairman of JCHS) and Shirley Richards, former president of the Lawyers Christian Fellowship. Dr. West dazzles us with his expert knowledge of gay sexual practices and misuses medical statistics to scare the audience to high heavens about the dangers of HIV (I Googled chariot racing and Dr. West's picture appears at the top of the page in images - I shit you not), while Richards comes in for the deathblow with her description of the impending global police state if gay persons are given the same rights as everyone else. These sections are interspersed with footage of vox pop interviews done on the streets where unsuspecting passers-by are asked loaded questions like "Would you like your child taught that anal sex is ok?" The propaganda style of the film is made all the more forceful by the complete absence of views by a single neutral expert in either the areas of philosophy, law, or medicine. There are calls throughout for the viewing public to sign a petition to keep the law superimposed on a quasi-reggae soundtrack declaring "no touch it." Yes, it's as painful as it sounds.

If you're able to make it through this shit storm in one sitting, good for you. It took me close to a week. The producers have smartly disabled comments on the YouTube video since all the comments were blasting the film to kingdom come - very similar to what happened with the embarrassing "Harlem shake" video produced by the Love March Movement (LMM), for which they offered a half-assed apology. Not to be left out of the idiocy, a couple representatives from the LMM (apparently the youth arm of the JCHS) also make an appearance in Sex, Lies and Rights towards the end. The film demonstrates just how dangerous religious fundamentalism can be, and like all true propaganda material, for the ignorant among us it as delectable as it is dangerous. I'm optimistic that the ideas found in the film will find their way into the dustbins of the future, but given the state of things I'm worried I may not be able to see it happen.

Cool Dude.

The Miracle of the Rejuvenated Vagina – The Baseline for Supernatural Believability

 I have often asked my theist friends, especially the Christian ones, if there is a miracle or supernatural assertion which is just too ridiculous to believe. One which not only defies the laws of nature (the very definition of a miracle), but also descends into the absurd (arguably an alternate definition), a miracle which, simply believing it could be true is an indictment on one’s intelligence. I think I may have stumbled up on such a miracle recently – and I call it the miracle of the rejuvenated vagina.

A picture being circulated on Facebook,
presumably depicting a vaginal blessing. 

Some time ago, veteran Jamaican journalist Ian Boyne interviewed a Jamaican pastor by the name of “bishop” Perry on his Religious Hardtalk program. Bishop Maurice Perrier had gained some amount of notoriety in Kingston from performing "miracles" via his deliverance sessions at his church. In the episode in question, Bishop Perrier was joined in studio by a handful of his congregants who had experienced a "healing" from him at some point in the past. One of the church sisters present at the interview told the story of how Bishop Perrier used his healing to remove a demon from her vagina which wasn't producing enough lubricant to allow the marriage to function smoothly. Bishop Perrier cast out the demon and water sprung forth from the well. 

Do you find this story a bit incredulous? I personally think it's utter bullshit. But I'm not selective about miracles; I group them all in the same category - implausible. If you're reading this and you believe in any sort of miracle however, you'd have to explain why it is you reject the miracle of the rejuvenated vagina but accept the others. It meets all the basic requirements of a miracle - defies logic, unverifiable, and unwitnessed by a single credible source. Further, if demons can possess and take over an entire body, or even several at a time, what's to stop them from commandeering a single vagina? I've heard stories of demons who've started fires, thrown furniture, and even caused natural disasters. Surely, turning a middle aged vagina into an arid wasteland should be child's play.

The Yardie Skeptics are proposing that the miracle of the rejuvenated vagina serve as the baseline for supernatural believability. Call it the minimum threshold which must be accepted before one can move on to accepting other more elaborate miracles. If you have trouble accepting the rejuvenated vagina, then it makes no sense to move on to believing other miracles. Unless you can craft a reasonable objection to this story of cervical demonic possession, then, as a miracle believer, you have to accept it as true. Once you find that reasonable objection, apply liberally to all the other miracles you accept and watch them gradually vanish into thin air.

Cool Dude.

Martin Henry's "divine" Crime Intervention Plan

Whenever personal ideological viewpoints are challenged to the point of overturning them, one of three things tends to happen: the ideological views get abandoned, they evolve and adapt to change, or they retreat into a state of fundamentalism and are reinforced for one last fight to the death. It seems that Gleaner columnist Martin Henry is falling back on this third option given some of his recent articles.

In his article of July 7 entitled “Science and Religion: Clash of Two Faiths” Henry suggests that science has dismissed a “mountain of evidence of non-material reality” to defend its own ends. This “mountain” that Henry speaks about is more fitting as a description of his own ignorance of the material world rather than as a description of evidence for a supernatural realm. There’s nothing wrong with ignorance – it is a necessary precursor to enlightenment and new discoveries. It is promoting ignorance to the status of certainty, a famous past time of religionists, which is problematic. Henry also makes the common relational fallacy of calling modern science a “product” of Christianity, which is no different I suppose from calling Christianity the parent of modern science. Well, I would gladly accept that Christianity is the parent of science if Henry also accepts that it was a foster parent, had a relationship characterized by incessant abuse and repeated attempts at infanticide, and which ultimately ended with the child leaving the home, becoming successful and then returning to enroll the parent into a nursing home.

Henry follows up this article with “Divine Intervention for Crime” published on August 11^th. In this article Henry claims that he could provide readers with “a whole battery of examples of crime reduction by divine intervention, including Kingston and across Jamaica” while constantly alluding to the need for a “revival” in Jamaica. I misinterpreted his use of the word revival; I thought he meant it in the sense of resuscitating a once successful crime prevention plan. It was only when Henry used the antics of two time mental asylum patient pastor Alexander Bedward as an example I became aware that Henry was actually talking about good old tambourine-beating, snake-handling, get-in-the-spirit revival. I shit you not.

Henry’s main argument in this article is that when the revival tents roll into town crime decreases. Oddly, he uses 100 and 200 year old examples to demonstrate this in Jamaica and the USA respectively. These examples demonstrate a simplistic and almost cartoon like understanding of crime – if criminal elements are distracted from committing crime, it means the crime problem is solved.

Temporarily distracting criminals with a baptism does not in any way resolve the social conditions which make crime and violence possible. The “revival” which Henry speaks about does not improve economic conditions, does not alleviate political corruption, and does not correct social injustice. Quite frankly, these revivals might in fact make the problem worse since they present us with the false illusion of making progress while we blindly ignore the problem to our own peril. 

Clive "Cool Dude" Forrester.