Homosexuality: Is it a normal or sick lifestyle?

Last Sunday, January 13, a large crowd of over 340,000 in the French capital, Paris, staged a demonstration against proposals by President François Hollande to legalise gay marriage and the adoption of children by gays and lesbians.

On January 11, Victoria University in Kampala woke up to the news that its affiliate in Britain, Buckingham University, was cutting all financial aid because of the controversial David Bahati anti-homosexuality Bill of 2009.

It was the first concrete decision taken against Uganda by a Western institution ever since the country gained the perceived title of homophobic capital of the world.
Considering that France is one of the most liberal and secular Western countries, it was interesting to see such a large crowd of French citizens demonstrate in 2013 against (of all current Western obsessions) gay marriage, while Uganda, the country that is supposedly the most anti-homosexual in the world, has never succeeded in marshalling more than 500 anti-gay activists at any one demonstration.

Even in the United States, where gay rights are supposed to be at their most accepted and protected, only 10 of America’s 50 states have voted to sanction gay marriage.
It raises the question, obviously, that if France and America can see such widespread hostility to gay marriage, why does this same West find it so surprising and annoying that the much more conservative, religious and rural Uganda should feel likewise?

Abrasive anti-gays?
Anti-gay activists like Mr Bahati and Pastor Martin Ssempa (especially Ssempa) have sometimes been a little too abrasive and insensitive in their campaign against homosexual activity in Uganda.
However, their controversial statements aside, the accumulated scientific research and psychiatric studies over the last 100 years (including those carried out in the more promiscuous 1960s decade) have consistently pointed to the fact that the phenomenon of homosexuality from a scientific and not even religious point of view is at best a result of severe developmental problems.
Even homosexuals themselves recognise this, their current defiance and “gay pride”, notwithstanding.

In early 2010, the Uganda-born, US-based writer Victoria Dara-Wilson appeared on the KFM Hot Seat programme. She married a man in the United States whom, she later discovered and who admitted, was gay.

Dara-Wilson told host Charles Mwanguhya-Mpagi that this traumatic experience got her researching as much as she could into homosexuality. According to her, there is no gay who would ever have wished to be gay.

In that sense homosexuals, male and female, require our utmost sympathy and understanding. Most gays and lesbians at a professional and public level, live normal lives as they themselves often emphasise.

To that extent, they should be granted the basic rights of citizenship that ordinary people enjoy.
Where some of us start to disagree with them, is when they go past demanding full legal rights in the countries they live in and actually declare or imply that there is something wrong, primitive, prejudiced and “homophobic” about the majority of the population that find gays odd or repulsive.
A “normal” person, that is, a heterosexual, should under ordinary circumstances find the very idea of homosexuality repugnant.

It is this revulsion toward homosexuality that, by definition, makes a heterosexual a heterosexual, otherwise if it weren’t so, gays would not be a distinct minority in every single country on earth.
Last week’s demonstration in France was proof of that.
Ironically, gays and lesbians in their relationships assume and aspire for all the features and routines of a traditional, heterosexual life.

How it happens
A domineering woman will be the “male” and her more gentle lesbian partner will be the “female”, while among the gay men the more assertive one acts out the “male” role and the more passive one acts the “female”.

In the Western world, gays have in recent years campaigned for the right to be granted that most traditional and mainstream of relationships --- marriage. Practically everything homosexuals campaign for, demand or try to act out is drawn from the very traditional institutions and social norms that they reject, in the first place.

Gays want to be “normal”, wish to be accepted as “normal” by the “normal” majority and from seeking to adopt children in France and Britain, to marriage, to the right to work in any institution without discrimination, their every aspiration seems to be of the most traditional and conservative kind.

The world of homosexuals, therefore, appears to be a distortion of the norm and deep in their innermost minds, homosexuals yearn to be “straight”. Homosexuals, to put it another way, are wannabe heterosexuals. What is the root cause of homosexuality?

Most psychologists and the pioneering psychiatrists agree that homosexual tendencies started to take shape in early childhood or sometimes at the turn of puberty due to a whole range of complex reasons.

“Ferenczi was the first to emphasise the fact that homosexuality…in a great number of cases, [constitutes] a symptomatic formation --- a prophylactic or creative device. [It appears] as a defence, a way of overcoming the anxiety connected with the opposite sex.” (Hendrick M. Ruitnebeek, The Psychotherapy of Perversions, The Citadel Press, 1967, page 44)
A splitting of the ego (or to simplify it, the inner mind) took place in the earliest stages of their childhood, catastrophic events or experiences that have since been forgotten by the conscious memory.

Their situation is similar to the hard drives that now store most of our digital data. You can delete or accidentally lose your information. For all intents and purposes, you can never find these lost files again.

However, as many of us know, there is software that can be used to recover this data that was accidentally or deliberately deleted that, to the average person, has been lost forever.
The sub-directories, the inner surface, the deeper layers where this apparently lost data on hard drives resides even after it has been deleted from the main disc surface, is what in psychoanalysis is termed the “unconscious”.

It is this stored data, these early childhood memories archived in our minds, which the pioneering psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, Anne Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler drew the world’s attention to in the early 20th Century.

It is these memories, still active but hidden from our present consciousness, that shape much of what we do and like or dislike. It is the reason we sometimes do things that even we don’t understand.

Two of Sigmund Freud’s disciples, Jung and Adler, disagreed with his over-emphasis on sex as the primary driving force in the development of the human mind and impulses.
Adler and Jung were to go on to explain other factors at work in our inner minds that shape or distort who we eventually become as adults.

Their findings are a sobering reminder that even we the “normal”, non-heterosexual majority carry mental hard drives that were damaged in our childhood. Homosexuals are definitely not “normal”; but at the same time, we the “normal” Ugandan majority are not as normal as we imagine, as we shall see next week. Most of us are as emotionally and psychically deformed as the gays we find repulsive.

The lesson about homosexuals and the twisted, non-homosexual traits clearly visible in most of us “normal” people is that the most important role a parent can ever play in a child’s life is not in buying them nice clothes and toys, not in taking them to good schools or raising them in comfortable homes.

The most important part a parent can play in a growing child’s life is to keep a close eye on that delicate and easily damaged hard drive called their minds, with anti-virus software in hand to regularly wipe out viruses from their vulnerable personalities.