Marketing is important. When you want to sell an unpopular idea, how you package it and present it to the public can make all the difference between success and failure. If you can manage to attach to your campaign a slogan that has such popular support that nobody would ever challenge it, then it could be a winning formula.

Listen to this marketing strategy; it is masterful, if utterly fallacious: "It is the human rights issue of the 21st century, the civil rights issue of our day. In the 19th century slavery was the big moral challenge, and good Christians quoted the Bible (especially Titus 2:9 and Eph 6:5) in support of slavery. It took a big campaign in the British parliament and civil war in the USA before slaves could get freedom. In the 20th century racism was the big challenge, and black people were an oppressed minority. At the time it was widely held - even among good Christian people - that people of African descent were inferior, and any one who believed in equal rights was swimming upstream.

"It took a massive public campaign and the death of people like Martin Luther King before black people could get equal rights in the USA. Today, such has been the success of the civil rights and human rights campaign over race, that racism is illegal, and anyone who upholds racist views in public is considered a bigot and a moral dinosaur.

"But in our day, the human rights and civil rights struggle lies in a different direction. There is another oppressed minority that cries out for justice and equality, and every well-thinking person, every person that supports equal rights and fair play, must support their struggle. Today, gays and lesbians are oppressed just as slaves were oppressed in the 19th Century, and black people were oppressed in the last century. Just as slavery and racial inequality were widely supported and considered normal in the past - even among good Christian people - today homosexuals are widely vilified - especially by church people.

"When gays and les-bians win their victory over bigotry and pre-judice and gain equality, when marriage between two women or two men is just as normal as between one man and one woman, then we will look back at these days of anti-gay sentiment as dinosaur days. We have the Anglican Church in the USA now with us; they have seen the light; the other churches will follow when they come out of the dark ages."

Is treatment of homosexuality and lesbianism to be equated with slavery and racism? It is true that in the past many Christians supported slavery and were racist, and that today most Christians eschew homosexuality and lesbianism; but that alone is not adequate to make an equation.

Issues of the past

The moral assessment of any situation - abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, condom use - must stand on its own and not ride on issues of the past. The sort of moral reasoning used above is what debaters call 'ad hominem argument'; abhorrence of slavery and racism is being used to drum up support for the normalisation of homosexuality and lesbianism.

Let us take the 'logical' approach above to its logical extreme. Today, sexual relations with animals (called bestiality) is considered abnormal, immoral and is illegal. From time to time we hear of persons indulging in this practice. There would be just as much justification for this sexual minority to cry 'oppression' and claim 'equal rights' as the gay and lesbian rights advocates above are doing.

Just being part of a 'moral minority' does not justify equal rights; it all depends on whether what that minority stands for is right in and of itself. We must not be side-tracked by ad hominem argument. The merits of each moral case must be examined on its own terms.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and a Roman Catholic deacon. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.