The Iranian president was responding to questions on Iran's treatment of homosexuals and in particular the barbaric manner of judicial killings of two youths found guilty of homosexuality or of molesting a boy, depending on what sources you believe, and to the outright denial of people who are placed under his government's care.

First off, I would like to qualify my article by stating that I do not belong to that party of people that would like to see Iran attacked, and I am actually quite concerned at the increasing levels of hatred towards Muslims in Western society; two underlying causes informing the racket following Mohamoud Ahmadinejad' comments. Still, it is outrageous that any head of state should give himself to over to such bigoted posturing.

showing denial the door

Let us ignore all of that, and the Columbia Dean's rude introduction, or his ignorance in calling Ahmadinejad a dictator. Let us ignore the fact that there are many countries around the world that have similarly beastly attitudes towards gay people, or that there are many that exhibit an ugly and terrifying bigotry behind a veneer of acceptance. Let us ask ourselves where our country stands, and where we as individuals stand on this human rights issue. Do you acknowledge the existence of homosexuals? Would you accord them rights equivalent to what you would any other Kenyan? Would you shun them, ostracise them, disown them or give them the cold shoulder merely because that was what society decreed?

I do not believe in moral relativism, especially not for such fundamental, inalienable liberties as the right to freedom of association or sexual expression. Our fledgling nation prides itself in its mostly Christian tradition, ascribing great importance to such values as charity and fellow-feeling. Such virtues however, find themselves obliterated when faced with the reality that perhaps 5% of all Kenyans, like any other society around the world, are homosexual. Should a Kenyan be confronted with the subject or evidence of homosexuality in his country, he will meet it full on with apoplectic anger, decry it as an imported Western vice, condemn it as sinful deviance, threaten with ostracism or like the Iranian President, meet it with a steady denial, 'there are no gays in this village.' Indeed so resolute is this rejection, it is worse than anything that would be meted out against even a murderer.

In mitigation, it must be said that these attitudes are not our own. However, corralled as they are by an attitude that dictates that homosexuality is profoundly alien to Africa and among the basest of sins, they have been accepted by our patriarchal and religious society as part of our identity. Any resistance to homophobia is therefore by definition perfidious to society and inimical to our relationship with our deity.

But this attitude is not just limited to homosexuality. A mindset has evolved from the conflation of the oppressive attitudes of Victorian England and the rigidity of our traditional societies that supports seeing sexual relations as shameful and unfit for public discourse. It involves denying the reality of human sexual actions and asserting a non-existent traditional heterosexual ideal as the only ‘natural' sexual life.

justice, equal rights for all

The trouble is that our hatred blinds us to the onset of the consequences of this attitude. Cultures that imprison themselves in this way end up warping human desires, which will most definitely not go away but will persist even as their practitioners hypocritically uphold the oppression of dissenters. This is why in such societies, incidences of the abuse of children and spouses are widespread, as are prostitution and rape. In such states, patriarchal structures persist with women assigned the traditional suppressed heterosexual role as wives and mothers, even as their men are free to engage in sexual promiscuity before marriage but demand only virgins for wives.

Under such rules, prostitution, porn and illicit relationships thrive but are kept covered up, even as the odd victim is made an example of in the most brutal fashion. Worst of all though, this refusal to be open, this sense of shame and hypocrisy in relation to sex also make discovering and dealing with abuse so much harder, and the pain and consequences are handed down generation after generation as society pretends not to see.

I am not suggesting for a minute that homosexuals have rights superior to those of other members of our society who are routinely oppressed, whether they are women, the disabled, children or minority communities. But only that we take a step back and reconsider our attitudes to those we do not understand or who have opinions or ways of life different than ours.