I was sitting in a friend’s office – I seem to be doing that more frequently these days – when we started talking about what I had skimmed in the headlines. Something about this agreement being a sign of the Apocalypse or something.

Clearly, I’m joking, but maybe I’m not. I’m not invested in this particular conversation, but my friends are so it’s an academic exercise at best. They were fishing for what I thought about having children learn about what I can best describe as a new concept of sexuality and whether it should be taught in schools.

Whenever I hit a topic like this, I admit my biases up front because I generally don’t view things the same. In this case, I glanced at the headlines, laughed a little and moved on with my life because any agreements are because of trade, and the reason Trinidad and Tobago is not in as good a position to negotiate anything is because of the mismanagement of the government over the years. I’m not pointing at one administration or party. I’m pointing at both.

So for me, that summarized the issue well.

But my friend has kids, nieces and nephews that could be affected, and I did notice it in a few headlines I looked at in the store. Front page news, this, because homophobia is still pretty stylish in Trinidad and Tobago. Getting into shades of sexuality in a country where heterosexual men and women ‘wine’ at, on, or through each other might be easier except it’s, for some strange reason, not. Most people I know my stance on it: I. Don’t. Care.

And no, that doesn’t mean I condone or condemn anything. I keep my sexuality tidily locked up somewhere. I think it’s in the back behind my old jeans in the closet. I could go look for it, I suppose, but what I do know is that if your sex life doesn’t affect me, I don’t care. It’s not my business. You like your sex, that sex, that’s great. Once everyone is a consenting adult and you don’t feel this need to give me details, I’m great. I’ll congratulate you if you find someone you’re happy with, but I’m not interested in the dirty details.

Others, however, seem to care a lot about what other people do and want to control it, and this has caused people to stand up for themselves, which has in turn caused a bunch of hostility when at the core of it all it’s really about authoritarianism versus liberty. We’ll get back to that point.

This being Sunday, I decided to poke around about this ‘Samoan Agreement’.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Catholic News TT gave us, “Economic Carrots with Ideological Strings“. Archbishop Gordon is more overt with, “‘EU imposing ideology that is not ours’“, which was even echoed in Barbados. Other articles from Trinidad and Tobago seem to rehash the same thing.

Then I caught what the Prime Minister of St. Vincent said and he mentioned the 400 page document.

It struck me in reading all this uninteresting drivel. So I found the Samoan Agreement here, which links to the 403 page PDF of the Samoan Agreement. Strangely, at no point in the document itself do they call it the ‘Samoan Agreement’, which is kind of dumb. Yet, it is the Samoan Agreement, apparently.

It has nothing about abortions, homosexuality, etc. It talks a lot about human rights, it’s worded ambiguously enough that wherever a nation’s legislation and morality lands, it’s pretty simple. It requires no changes to the curriculum. Go search the document. If you find something, do something wonderful that no one has done yet: Cite it.

It may make babies be born naked, and we all know they have the right to be clothed at birth, but since this unlikely to be possible soon, I’d suggest we table it.

So now I’ll get back to that authoritarianism versus liberty thing again. Authoritarianism is blaming another for authoritarianism because authoritarianism loves the whole ‘us‘ and ‘them‘ argument. Authoritarianism is about doing what someone else wants, liberty is about doing what you want without impacting others.

From what I read, the Samoan Agreement simply says, “We agree to a standard of human rights which are necessarily ambiguous because no one can agree on them in practice.” Sex education? Sure, but it doesn’t specify a curriculum. It doesn’t really specify anything.

They’ll say, “Well, one day it could mean…” and maybe that’s true. But it is not this day. No one is being threatened by the agreement. In fact, religion shows up 4 times and they’re not telling people that they have to be of a certain religion.

Human Rights include the right to be properly informed. If you’re going to start a panic, at least cite where you got it from.