Shirley Richards in her article 'Religious freedom under threat' published Sunday, December 13, has successfully perpetuated the often under-rated skill of talking out of both sides of one's mouth. It is not easy, and requires a great deal of mental gymnastics to achieve this, but such is the affliction of the blindly pious.

Unfortunately, those trumpeting the loudest for religious freedom and citing instances of gross breaches of it, are most often merely advocating an agenda of intolerance for the unashamedly non-Christian, non-heterosexual, pro-choice, pro-human-rights part of the population - those irritating infidels who talk about democracy and not theocracy.

The irrelevance of evangelical Christianity is becoming more and more obvious, especially as it tries to usurp the public conscience through organisations, such as the Lawyers Christian Fellowship (an oxymoronic institution of epic proportions given their political agenda). They seek to promote the most repugnant of fundamentalist views as the moral obligations of the Government, all the while warning of the invisible 'gay-liens' in the sky waiting to swoop down and dominate if the wording of critical documents, such as the Charter of Rights, is not impenetrable.

Potentially dangerous

A concept such as 'privacy', therefore, becomes negligible for fear that if it remains in the Charter of Rights (a commitment by the Government to protect the basic rights of all Jamaicans - about 40 years overdue) then 'those people' will want privacy, and Jehovah would never want that!

For Richards, the reference to a "free and democratic society" in the Charter of Rights is potentially dangerous. Given what has transpired in other "free and democratic" states where "desires have become rights" she, therefore, urges (threatens?) Government to rephrase that clause lest it opens the gates for "those people". What a sinister line of thought!

I am now more than ever convinced that Richards is the voice of a morally bankrupt coalition of faith-based institutions that is dangerous to democracy.

Unfortunately, far too many persons are afraid to say anything for fear of invoking the wrath of the malevolent backra-massa in the sky for whom persons of her ilk claim to speak.

I am not one of them.

I am, etc.,

BRIAN-PAUL N. WELSH

brianpaul.welsh@gmail.com