(2)

...FOR A HEALTHY FUTURE [click for audio]

Let us therefore be wholly clear that it is a just and right thing to exercise discrimination. It has been so from before the beginning of human thought and human speech: because you cannot think without distinguishing one thing from another, and to do that is to exercise discrimination. The very creation narrative in Genesis portrays discrimination when it declares: God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.

Yet in the hands of lawyers and others, this rich and overarching meaning has effectively been narrowed down, so that in many minds the meaning of the term "discrimination" is only the wrong or unjust sort of treatment that has often historically been meted out to particular categories of individuals, but not to others. Examples of such categories have been, and in some instances still are, those deemed lower in the "caste system" still very evident in some parts of the world, or those referred to as "natives", or "persons of colour". There are many categories of humanity by which we have historically distinguished ourselves from one another, and there are probably just as many ways that wrong or unjust treatment has been meted out to us or to our fellow men or women. So-termed "non-discrimination" laws and constitutional clauses have been introduced in consequence of this, in the hope that this sort of injustice may be controlled or even abolished. The intent of this embodied much that is good, but our human capacity to get things seriously wrong even in the exercise of our best efforts is in danger at this point of taking us down a path of destruction. Thinkers in an earlier era began to refer to this universal human failing of getting things wrong as "total depravity". "Total depravity" means that even our best human efforts, good though their intent may be, will always, without the intervening and directing grace of God, miss the high mark for which they aim. In the creation of "non-discrimination" laws and constitutional clauses, one evidence of such universal human failing is this very narrowing down of the essential meaning of Discrimination, the exercise of which is the very stuff of humanity itself, without which we could not reason, think, talk or distinguish the right from the wrong, the true from the false.

 For,  "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Without the capacity for Discrimination such life, the very light of humanity itself, must be extinguished.

So we must regard the laws and codes with which we ought to be governed and the language of their construction with the greatest of care. In the earliest days of the Caymanas the body of law that governed the community was extremely sparse and thin, but still it was said that the small population governed itself quite well with scarcely any body of law. At this point, however, a rather short time later, the legal situation seems to have reached the polar opposite, with laws being claimed by some to govern us, and not always with our consent, from many sources, some indeed as far away as Strasbourg.