By Jerry Okungu
Nairobi, Kenya
August 11, 2010
Some Christians can never stop to amaze me. They have this misplaced belief that unless they have their way, nothing else can be right. This preoccupation with being the custodians of all wisdom, knowing what is right or wrong, moral or not is the curse that is killing the Christian church.
We have just gone through a tough campaign period over the constitution in which all these professionals including ordinary Catholics had ample time to have their say. We went through a referendum because we had divergent views that could not be reconciled by any other body unless we went to the court of public opinion. Now that the public has decided, what is it that is itching these so called catholic professionals? Could it be the NGO donor money that they are fearing will dry up now that Kenyans have concluded the plebiscite?
Like all other No factions, the Catholic professionals campaigned so hard to derail the document and unlike in the past, they had equal access to the media where they had a chance to discredit the document to the extent of peddling blatant untruths. Still, Kenyans gave them a hearing without throwing brick bats at them.
Now, a week later, the lay Catholic professionals and organizations have the temerity to tell Kenyans that they will not accept the new constitution because it is divisive and has offending clauses that will lead the country into moral decadence!
Let me say my piece when it comes to who has the authority to talk about moral decadence in this country. I and my fellow ordinary Kenyans may not have that authority but neither are my Catholic brothers and sisters. In my perspective, the Catholic teachings have fallen on deaf ears and that is why abstinence has never caught fire. Young people still have sex; get pregnant, contract sexually transmitted diseases and die of HIV and Aids simply because the Catholic Church has refused to accept safe sex as a necessary evil.
Where else can you find hypcretes masquerading as holy fathers and sisters yet behind closed doors they practice sex and sodomy with abundance? How many billions of dollars has the Church in Rome paid as compensation for victims of the Church’s randy bishops and priests all over the world? Didn’t the Pope in Rome just ask the world for forgiveness for the sins and atrocities committed over the years by his priests? Have these lay professionals of the good old church ever watched a movie called Thorn Birds or In God’s Name?
These misguided lay professionals claim that despite advice from spiritual leaders, the political class arrogantly refused to listen to the voice of the people and that now there are two groups of people with a wide valley between them, the prolife Kenyans with family values and the anti-life and anti-family Kenyans. They claim that Kenya’s darkest day was on the day the referendum results were announced.
To tell you the truth, there were no spiritual leaders that spoke to politicians during the referendum debates. The people who refused to listen to advice from spiritual leaders were their church congregations, their own flock in the church. It was a rebellion against the teachings of false prophets.
All we had were voices of religious zealots and fundamentalists preaching hatred against Islam and their outdated religious dogma. Had they been voices of reason, they would have known that to allow a mother of other children to die because of a foetus is a more horrible sin than aborting the foetus. If they were really the men of God, they would have listened to their congregations to gauge the mood of their followers. They didn’t.
It is like living in fools' paradise to talk of the divide between Kenyans. A paltry 2.7 million Kenyans voted against the constitution for three distinct reasons. Politicians voted against it because it would deprive them of political deals and cabinet positions in the government. MPs that opposed it did not want the power to increase their salaries taken away. Some like Daniel arap Moi opposed it because of land ownership. Only the church was concerned about such mundane issues like abortion and the Kadhi’s Courts. Looked at a fresh, even the 900,000 votes that went to the church cannot all be claimed by Catholics. There evangelicals to share the spoils. In effect there were no 20 million Christian voters to derail the constitution as the NCCK had vowed.
Yet, compared to the 6.09 million Kenyans that voted for the document, who can these misguided lay professionals claim to be kidding? The principal of democracy is rather simple and straight forward. Let us take a vote if we disagree and may the best person win. Once the vote is counted, civilized competitors swallow their pride and walk away. They don’t linger around to grumble that they were not listened to.
The good thing about Kenya is that these misguided individuals have already been deserted by their political colleagues. Isaac Ruto is rooting for inclusion into the implementation process. Others are pleading not to be shown the door from the cabinet. Some sane catholic bishops have accepted the outcome and washed their hands off as Pilate did over the blood of Jesus while ordinary worshippers that campaigned against it in Rift Valley have accepted the results and want to go on with their lives.
Good bye lay Catholic professionals. Leave us alone to implement the document in piece.
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