ANOTHER REMINDER

RECENT EVENTS ON THE ISLAND OF BORNEO involving photogenic Eleanor Hawkins, 23, and nine other youngsters atop the sacred peak of Mount Kinabalu have set off an intelligent discussion about whether or not the Malaysian authorities, and more particularly the Dasun tribe, for whom the mountain is the home for the souls of their dead ancestors, have overreacted in punishing these youths for playfully getting their kits off.

THE MORNING CHAT PROGRAMMES throughout the week have involved debate about whether or not there was any wrongdoing involved, and, although I tended to detect a certain smugness from some of the invited beardies about a tribe that still sacrifices buffaloes to the gods and believes that an earthquake was caused because of this behaviour, the general consensus of opinion was that we should tolerate other people's beliefs and respect their traditions when in their countries.

THIS SMUGNESS IS RIDICULOUS in the sense that our own sacred and fundamental texts in Western society, such as the Torah, the Christian Bible and the great Graeco-Roman works, suggest a God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for indecent activity and that Mount Olympus was the home of the gods, a mountain one could presumably not climb, lift up one's cloak and show a bit of hairy Greek arse without causing ire.

MILLIONS OF WESTERNERS LISTEN TO READINGS from these texts every weekend, and I imagine there is little laughing in either church or synagogue. And there is not a lot of sniggering when studying classics at university, where the Roman and Greek belief systems are treated with great respect. The system is so much a part of our heritage that our days, months, planets and other matters are still named after them.

BUT THE SERIOUS PARALLELS TO THIS EVENT involve what happened recently with equally photogenic Stephen Fry, 57, and his young husband Elliott Spencer whilst on honeymoon in Honduras, where, according to Spencer, the couple were forced to abandon the country because of intolerance towards a married couple of the same sex. This has not been the subject of the same sort of morning television chatter, although several commentators have lamented the event, with Sebastian Shakespeare in The Daily Mail even referring to the issue as "gay-hating locals" ruining Fry's honeymoon, although homosexuality is not illegal in the Honduras.

APART FROM THE USUAL RABID reactionaries and radicals who write on message boards, I have yet to see anyone come out and defend the devoutly Catholic locals of the Honduras in the same way as our good and great defend the Dasun tribe and their own beliefs.

THE SAD MESSAGE IS CLEAR once again: if a small tribe on a remote island believes that girls taking their bras off above the clouds where no one can see them can cause a deadly earthquake then we must respect their culture, obey their rules and pay a fine so they can buy and kill eight buffaloes and sacrifice them; but if a devoutly Catholic people refuses to accept our own rules about same-sex marriage then they are just backward, gay-hating Nazis.

ONE WONDERS WHAT SORT OF OUTRAGE would be provoked if the people of Malaysia, and particularly the Dasun tribe, were referred to as "girl-hating retrogrades". It is simply another reminder that if one wishes to espouse the mainstream values that have been the foundation and are still the bedrock of our society one is lamentably in the wrong in the eyes of the Media.