Just as well that Special Programmes minister Esther Murugi did not mean what she was misquoted as saying when she urged Kenyans to tolerate gays.
A person of her solid Christian upbringing should not miss the bold print of Leviticus 18.22, which unequivocally says that God hates men who have sex with men.
With God, there cannot be standing on the fence. You are either with Him or you stand opposed, thus inviting his righteous and instantaneous wrath. That is why the moral leadership of the country must be heard loud and clear in the chorus of condemnation against gays and sex workers.
For a long time, HIV has been comfortable with being secretly transmitted from sex workers to truck drivers and then into marriage, until men who have sex with men also started demanding attention by wearing tight-fitting clothes. Now, there are some people who also want to edge in sideways and suggest that sex work should be free, like selling airtime.
On the statute books, men having sex with men ranks up there with bestiality, both of which attract a 14-year jail term without argument. Even with the country studiously ignoring them, the Bible ostracising them and the legal system strict as it is, men who have sex with men and male prison populations have been contributing 15.2 per cent of all new human immunodeficiency virus infections, according to the Modes of Transmission study carried out in 2008.
The numbers for Nairobi are 16.4 per cent, Coast 20.5 per cent and Nyanza six per cent, suggesting that men who have sex with men need to be ignored more pointedly lest they become a permanent fixture of Kenyan society.
These people, whom the current Kenya National Aids Strategic Plan groups together with male and female sex workers as well as injecting drug users as most at risk of acquiring HIV, should never be recognised, let alone acknowledged. Planning to reach them with messages, condoms and drugs is going against the teachings of all Holy Scriptures and the laws of Kenya.
Kenyans should shudder to imagine how much more men who have sex with men would contribute to new HIV infections if their lifestyle was not classified as offences against the order of nature and hidden away from public view.
They are out there competing with people in heterosexual marriages or regular unions, and the casual, sex pap types, who account for 44.1 per cent and 20.3 per cent of all new infections, respectively. And they are not even acknowledged.
Men who have sex with men are such an insignificant population, easy to pick out of a crowd because of their loud dressing and exaggerated walking style, that suggesting in the country’s five-year strategic plan on fighting Aids that they should be targeted with education, condoms, treatment for sexually transmitted infections and anti-retroviral drugs is just absurd.
Give gays an inch and they will take a mile. The next thing you know, instead of trying to become like everybody else, they will be demanding special seats in the National Assembly, the Senate, and the county assemblies.
When men who have sex with men are in the closet, they feel little compulsion to maintain face-saving relationships with women, which is probably why their female partners account for 1.45 per cent of new HIV infections.
A note of censure must be extended to the women who get infected this way. Do they not have any way of knowing a gay man from the way they will be edging them away from the mirror, manicuring their nails and doing the kitchen work?
Instead of spending Sh142,880 to avert a single HIV infection in men who have sex with men, the Ministry of Special Programmes might want to concentrate on finding the Sh640,000 it needs to spend to achieve a similar result through school-based programmes for girls.
It can also start an early search for the Sh800,000 it needs for behaviour change communication to avert one infection among boys in a year. No sooner will the government start spending money on men who have sex with men in the guise of fighting HIV and Aids, than a bolt of lightning will strike the country, bringing with it sterility and sickness.
It is best not to provoke nature and the deity by tolerating gays, enumerating them and extending treatment and care to them even for conditions as serious as HIV and Aids.
The more socially isolated men who have sex with men are, in prison and outside, the less they will affect the rest of society. The loneliness will force them to come back to their senses and abandon their lifestyle, which is obviously not pleasing in God’s sight. It is called tough love.
kwamchetsi@formandcontent.co.ke
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