Prominent Adventist Pastor in Jamaica Condemns “Buggery,” Calls Homosexual Sex a Perversion
July 27, 2017: Charles Brevitt, a high profile Adventist pastor in Jamaica, has condemned “buggery,” using the term as a description for same-sex anal intercourse.
He said that such homosexual activity was in the same league as “the whole gamut of sexual perversions,” including bestiality, incest and sex outside marriage.
“Buggery, or homosexuality, is no worse than a man who has his wife and has his sweetheart next door to him,” Brevitt added. “It is the same law that says you shall not commit adultery and fornication, which implicates buggery as being wrong.”
Brevitt presides over the Glendevon circuit of Seventh-day Adventist churches, in the suburban St. James parish of Jamaica.
He made the comments in an interview with Jamaica’s The Gleaner in the context of a Jamaican parliamentary review of the country’s Sexual Offenses Act.
Lord Bishop Howard Gregory, head of the Anglican Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands has pushed for the abolishment of Jamaica’s buggery law instead of conducting a referendum on it.
Current Jamaican law defines buggery as anal sex between two men or between a man and a woman.
It is a crime currently punishable by up to ten years imprisonment and hard labor.
“Sexual activity engaged in public spaces is illegal and should continue to be so, whether of a heterosexual or homosexual nature. Beyond that, what happens in privacy between consenting adults should be beyond the purview of the Government,” said the Anglican bishop.
Jamaican society has a very low level of tolerance for homosexuality, particularly between same-sex male couples. Current legislation outlaws male homosexuality but not lesbianism.
Jamaica has a high level of violent crime directed at LGBT people. In 2012, the United States Department of State said that homophobia was “widespread in the country.”
