Judging by the number of letters that keep appearing in the local press, the current trend of abusing faafafines shows no signs of going away. Some correspondents clearly believe they are on the moral high ground.

They quote from the Bible presumably in the hope that a few well chosen passages will settle the argument and put an end to the debate. Faafafines have been called deviant, sinful, evil and a curse. We are supposed to believe that with a bit more effort, and the Grace of God, they can give up their evil ways and become respectable human beings again.

I once heard of a minister who every week wrote notes to himself in the margins of his sermons: ‘argument a bit weak here – speak louder.’ For the written word, the equivalent to speaking louder is to repeat oneself. It is common experience that if someone says something often enough not only will they convince themselves, but many other people as well, that what they say is true – even when it is not.

There are two errors that I consider underlie a lot of the nonsense that has recently been written about Faafafines. One is the error of equating  faafafines with homosexuals. The words are not synonymous and it gets us nowhere to confuse the two. To do so betrays either carelessness or ignorance. Unasa professor Felise Vaa wrote a clear article some months ago in the Observer Newspaper defining the various terms that apply to males who, in one way or another, express variations in sexual orientation. There are those who feel or behave like women – Faafafines; dress like women – cross-dressers; derive sexual pleasure from cross dressing - transvestites;  have a sexual relationship with another male – homosexuals. Even then, homosexuals are not a homogeneous group; they may be active or inactive, male or female. Some faafafines may be homosexual: the majority of homosexuals are certainly not faafafines.

Because most, if not all, the negative attitudes towards faafafines.and homosexuals stem from readings from the Bible, it is worth asking if what the authors of the Old Testament wrote some three thousand years ago is still relevant in today’s world. Conservatives will say that it is: liberals will say in many instances it is not. One of the correspondents to the Observer pointed out that much of what we read in Leviticus is at best irrelevant, and at worst plainly abhorent to today’s way of thinking.

The missionaries who brought the Bible to Samoa in the early nineteenth century were traditional in their interpretation of the Bible. But they came before Darwin, Freud and Jung. They had no way of anticipating the changes in world view that would result from the developments of modern science. If the missionaries could not have anticipated these new ideas, how much less could the authors of the Old Testament three thousand years ago?

Christopher Sablan, in a recent column in this newspaper (July 14^th), made some pertinent observations about the biology of sexual relationships. He pointed out that homosexual behaviour has been observed in no less than 450 animal species. It is clearly not unique to humans. Those who believe that God designed the world as we now find it would have to accept that homosexuality, at least in animals, was part of the plan. Biology gives us insights into the human condition that are, in the present context, far more helpful than anything we could gain from a literal interpretation of Old Testament Scripture. (Incidentally, is it not a strange irony that Christian conservatives hold Old Testament Scripture in such high regard when Judaism, which is based on that scripture, does not accept that Christ was the Son of God, a key belief of the Christian religion?)

Modern biology and psychology show that sexuality, along with many other personality traits, exists as a spectrum. There is a gradient from one end of the spectrum to the other. Most people lie near one or other end, and are clearly either male or female. Others are less polarised and show characteristics of both sexes. In the earliest stages of human development within the womb, the foetus at first is not differentiated into male or female, but has anatomical structures common to both sexes. Even when fully developed there remains something of the female in all men and something of the male in all women. Sin and evil are outdated and meaningless concepts when seen in the light of the observed biological facts.

Let faafafines recapture the status they had in Polynesian society before the missionaries brought the Bible with its dubious references to sexual morality. After all, tattooing is no longer looked on as a sin. We should not be unduly influenced by some ancient Hebrew tribes who succeeded in getting their homophobic prejudices incorporated into Holy Scripture.

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