Jamaica prime minister Bruce Golding reiterated this week that he believes all Jamaicans should enjoy a right to privacy and equality — except same-sex-attracted Jamaicans.

Golding told reporters last month that he has no intention of moving to repeal laws that incarcerate same-sex-attracted persons for their private intimate activities.

Antigay Caribbean nations, some of which criminalize homosexuality and permit mobs to assault and kill gay people, enjoy the ongoing support of the ex-gay Exodus Global Alliance.

Around the world, as many as eighty-six countries criminalize same-gender sexuality; Exodus Global Alliance claims a presence in many of them, and explicitly opposes criminalization and discrimination in none.

From Ecuador and its ex-gay torture and incarceration centers to Gambia and its plan to behead all gays, Exodus Global Alliance says nothing about the human rights of those who “struggle” with same-sex attraction. Instead, the Exodus alliance legitimizes its host countries’ violent methods by promoting undefined ex-gay conversion while offering no public guidelines — no restraints — upon the barbarity of powerful antigay church and government agencies.

In the United States, the leaders of Exodus International and Focus on the Family strive to make life dangerous for gay and bisexual Americans and their families by:

• associating equitable punishment for violent antigay hate crimes with “thought crime“
• distributing antigay literature in public schools and opposing anti-bullying programs
• opposing inclusion of sexual orientation in existing antidiscrimination laws, which already include religion as a protected category and exempt religious groups from compliance
• blaming innocent parents for their child’s sexual orientation
• promoting pro-violence activists such as Ken Hutcherson, an Exodus conference speaker who demands that employers discriminate and affirms violence against gay men and “effeminate” heterosexual men in the United States and Eastern Europe

The goal of these activities, as Exodus president Alan Chambers has acknowledged, is to compel same-sex-attracted persons to change, in defiance of biology, psychology, and sound moral conscience. Chambers admitted in 2004:

Had same-sex marriage been legal in 1990 I am certain that I would have tested that option. I met men whom I wanted to “marry.” … The law kept me from making one, if not many, huge mistakes. And while honoring and preserving the sanctity of heterosexual marriage is the bedrock of my opposition to redefining marriage to suit a few, I believe a positive bi-product of keeping same-sex marriage illegal is that it will save tens of thousands of hurting young people like me from the biggest mistakes of their lives: looking to man to meet a need that only God can meet.

In Jamaica, according to Human Rights Watch and the New York Times, “pro-family” advocates go a few steps further to discourage homosexuality:

In addition to making homosexuality illegal, public officials, the media, and ministers have incited mobs to such a degree that, on Jan. 29, one mob invaded a house where five gay people who were having a dinner party, beat them senseless and apparently killed at least one man. Last year, a mob disrupted a gay man’s funeral and trashed the church. In 2004, according to Time magazine, a teenager was nearly killed when his father learned his son was gay and urged a mob to lynch the boy at his school. And when two of the island’s gay-rights advocates, Steve Harvey and Brian Williamson, were murdered, a crowd celebrated over Williamson’s disfigured body. Time recounts numerous other mob killings in recent years.

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