Akash Sama­roo

Arch­bish­op Ja­son Gor­don is be­ing told to stop call­ing mem­bers of the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty sin­ners, even if he stands with the Pope’s po­si­tion that ho­mo­sex­u­al acts should not be crim­i­nalised.

Speak­ing on the Eye on De­pen­den­cy ra­dio pro­gramme with Garth St Clair and Natasha Nunez on Sun­day evening, Arch­bish­op Gor­don was asked by the hosts to com­ment on Pope Fran­cis’ re­cent com­ments on ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty.

Ad­dress­ing re­porters af­ter vis­it­ing South Su­dan in Feb­ru­ary, the Pope said while the Catholic Church can­not per­mit “sacra­men­tal” mar­riage of same-sex cou­ples, the laws ban­ning ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty were “a prob­lem that can­not be ig­nored.”

In con­tex­tu­al­is­ing the Pope’s com­ments, Arch­bish­op Gor­don said, “We’ve said for a long time, hate the sin and not the sin­ner.”

The Arch­bish­op said while civil­i­sa­tion has re­alised that the act of sodomy is “moral­ly wrong,” whether or not it should be a cap­i­tal crime, “is a whole oth­er sto­ry.”

“So, adul­tery, sodomy, all of these things were cap­i­tal crimes at one time, so as we move from it be­ing a cap­i­tal crime, the sodomy laws re­main on the books as a law, where you can con­vict some­one up to 25 years if they are con­vict­ed of sodomy, which is a strange set of sex­u­al per­ver­sions,” Gor­don added.

Gor­don said the law was once used in Eng­land to con­fis­cate lands.

“So, the ques­tion is, should it be a crime? Is it wrong? It is ab­solute­ly wrong. Is it moral? It is an im­moral act, but is it a crime? That’s the ques­tion the Holy Fa­ther was rais­ing and he’s say­ing where­as it is im­moral and it is some­thing that is not good for so­ci­ety, a per­son should not go to jail for 25 years be­cause of the act,” he said.

But hu­man rights ac­tivist Ja­son Jones yes­ter­day said the church has no place in this dis­cus­sion.

“What hap­pens be­tween two con­sent­ing adults in the pri­va­cy of their bed­room is not a mat­ter for the church,” Jones said.

Jones al­so took is­sue with the Arch­bish­op’s open­ing state­ment of, “hate the sin, love the sin­ner.”

“Once a catholic priest us­es the term hate I switch off, be­cause if you are try­ing to say it shouldn’t be il­le­gal but we hate the sin, then you’re still con­demn­ing us and we don’t have any time for that,” he said.

Jones said the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty will take no com­fort in the Arch­bish­op’s words even if they sound sym­pa­thet­ic to their strug­gles.

“It ac­tu­al­ly mud­dies the wa­ter and it cre­ates even more con­fu­sion for the gen­er­al pub­lic, be­cause what does that mean? And that type of hyp­o­crit­i­cal stand­ing on the fence does not help any­one.”

In 2018, Jones filed a law­suit against the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go, chal­leng­ing two spe­cif­ic pro­vi­sions of the Sex­u­al Of­fence Act which crim­i­nalise bug­gery and se­ri­ous in­de­cen­cy. The hu­man rights ac­tivist at the time said those laws in­fringe up­on his rights as a gay man.

Yes­ter­day, he re­vealed to Guardian Me­dia that he has, in fact, writ­ten to Pope Fran­cis, chal­leng­ing the head of the Catholic Church on his lat­est po­si­tion on ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty.

He said, “Af­ter that state­ment, I wrote a let­ter say­ing it’s very nice of you to say that but I come from a coun­try where we are still crim­i­nalised and it’s caus­ing so much harm and your state­ment is not help­ing us.”

Jones is await­ing a re­ply.