Homosexuality and Women

Rastafari are very conservative in their view of homosexuality, it is condemned largely based on Old Testament edicts. In the summer of 2007, in the Toronto, Ontario area, five Jamaican dancehall musicians, including Buju Banton, had their shows cancelled for virulently anti-homosexual lyrics that called for the murder or eradication of “queers”. Bob Marley was far more benevolent towards homosexuality; he had no cause to disdain them, but they could not be Rastafari.

But in 2006, “Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen,” says Rebecca Schleifer of US-based Human Rights Watch, and author of a scathing report on the island’s anti-gay hostility. Buju Banton, who is one of the nation’s most popular dance-hall singers, grew up the youngest of 15 children in Kingston’s Salt Lane, a slum dominated by ultraconservative Christian churches and intensely anti-gay Rastafarians. Banton’s his first hit, 1992’s “Boom Bye-Bye”, boasts of shooting gays with Uzis and burning their skin with acid “like an old tire wheel.” The singer Elephant Man declares in one song, “When you hear a lesbian getting raped, it’s not our fault... Two women in bed, that’s two Sodomites who should be dead.” Another, Bounty Killer, urges listeners to burn “Mister Faggoty” and make him “wince in agony.”

Reggae’s anti-gay rhetoric has seeped into the country’s politics. Jamaica’s major political parties have passed some of the world’s most punitive anti-sodomy laws and regularly incorporate homophobic music in their election campaigns. Biblical proclamations on homosexuality, such as Leviticus 18:22 “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” are commands to the Rasta. Rastafari believe that homosexuality is a product of Babylon (the corrupt modern world) and will not be found in Zion, the Promised Land of black justice. Jamaica has more churches per capita than anywhere else on earth, most of them preaching a fundamentalist Christianity. Jamaican Rastafari believe in racial segregation and an ultra-orthodox fire-and-brimstone reading of the Old Testament. The hard-line Bobo Shanti have an even stricter interpretation of the Old Testament. Not all Rastafari are homophobic, but TIME Magazine referred to Jamaica as “the most homophobic place on Earth” because of the dozens of murders and hundreds of attacks on gays on the island each year.

The Rasta view of a woman’s place in the world is also extremely conservative. The women in Rastafari are normally referred to as Queens. Many Rastafarian marriages are informal (common law) and this explains the rather loose paternity obligations of some Rasta men. A woman’s role is housekeeping, childrearing and pleasing her King. A Rastafarian Queen must reject “Babylonial” society, or Western culture. Rastafari women cannot use make up, they cannot dress in short skirts and they cannot use chemicals in their hair. Many Rastafarian women cannot use any form of birth control, as it is not natural and also seen as a Euro-centric way to control the African population, and abortion is also not an option, as it is seen as murder. Rastafarian women are expected to know their place and nurture the community.