Here's where I have trouble...

Here's where I have trouble in following some of President Obama's reasoning.

I love my children. That love expresses itself in many ways: spending time with them, educating them, laughing with them, providing for them, listening to their piano practice. It also expresses itself in specific, and appropriate, physical ways: tickling them, hugging them, chasing them around the garden, and when younger, throwing them into the air and catching them.

For that, I should be judged - positively. These are good loving behaviours.

That love does not express itself sexually; and if it were to do so, I should be judged negatively: that would be bad behaviour.

The same is true, of course, mutatis mutandis, for many other relationships in my life: with my parents, my siblings, my friends and so on.

There is one relationship, and one only, in which love is expressed sexually, and that is with my wife. That fact, not least the exclusivity of that sexual relationship, is beneficial to me, to her, to our children and to wider society. From it flows the family itself, including its stability; and our commitment to each others ensures that we do not threaten the stability of any other relationships, which is also in wider society's interests; as is the fact that we do not contract or transmit STIs, nor require abortions to correct 'mistakes.'

So when Obama says that nobody should be persecuted because of whom he or she loves, I agree. But when he extrapolates from that proposition the idea that States have a duty to promote homosexual relations on the same footing as married relations, I cannot follow him.

And he says that in Africa: a continent plagued with AIDS that has been spread by sexual promiscuity, not least amongst practicing homosexuals. 

Indeed, until relatively recently when they started to sanitise their image, part of gay pride for some homosexual men was a pride in promiscuity - and a promiscuity that reached staggering proportions. That is now not publicised: instead, a strategy was put in place which ensured we hear about the stable couples who have been together for 20 years. But who is to say which of these gay myths is nearer to reality?

What is clear is that Obama's only idea of controlling AIDS, swamping the population with condoms, is insufficient; and his promotion of a particular philosophy of how Africans should regulate their own affairs is both morally bankrupt and tainted by an American superiority that smacks of colonialism.