Yesterday, Prime Minister Perry Christie and his governing Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) brought to the House of Assembly a series of bills to amend the constitution in order to bring gender equality in the passage of citizenship to children.
Currently, Bahamian women who have children with foreign men outside of The Bahamas do not automatically pass that citizenship to those children as Bahamian men do. The bills also address other issues of gender discrimination.
"These four bills, representing the first round of constitutional reform, are bound together by a common thread: The need to institute full equality between men and women in matters of citizenship and, more broadly, to eliminate discrimination in The Bahamas based on sex," said Christie in the House of Assembly.
The first bill seeks to give a child born outside The Bahamas to a Bahamian-born mother and non-Bahamian father the same automatic right to Bahamian citizenship that the constitution already gives to a child born outside The Bahamas to a Bahamian-born father and a non-Bahamian mother.
The second bill seeks to enable a Bahamian woman who marries a foreign man to secure the same access to Bahamian citizenship that a Bahamian man enjoys under the constitution as it relates to his foreign spouse.
The third bill seeks to reverse the law that prohibits an unwed Bahamian man from passing his citizenship to his child if he or she is born to a foreign woman.
The fourth bill seeks to make it unconstitutional for any law or any person acting in the performance of any public office to discriminate based on sex. Overwhelming majorities are needed in the House and Senate, along with a majority vote in a referendum, for these provisions of the constitution to be changed.
The referendum has been scheduled for November 6. Thus far, the governing and opposition parties support the bills. We have been here before, however, when it comes to amending the constitution to ensure gender equality.
There was a referendum in February 2002. In the parliamentary phase of that reform process, Christie and the PLP, then in opposition, stood with Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham and the Free National Movement (FNM) on the referendum questions.
Near to a general election and sensing the FNM's weakness, Christie and the PLP then switched their position on the referendum campaign trail. They went against Ingraham and his governing party, mounting an aggressive "vote no" campaign. Christie's Machiavellian move worked.
The PLP's "vote no" position defeated the FNM's "vote yes" position at the referendum. It then defeated the FNM again at the May 2002 general election, making Christie prime minister for the first time. Christie and the PLP sacrificed the national good for political power in 2002.
He now comes to Parliament attempting to look like the one who is leading his people to gender equality. While Christie is doing the right thing now, he should be condemned in the strongest terms for what he did 12 years ago.
No one should consider our current prime minister a passionate advocate of gender equality despite yesterday's move.
While not admitting the terrible wrong of 2002, Christie said his government will, from a policy perspective, grant citizenship to the children of Bahamian women who were not automatically eligible for it from July 9, 1973 up to the time the amendments take effect, if they pass. While this is a proper gesture, the prime minister should also have apologized to the nation for leading the effort that ultimately denied the children of these women citizenship since 2002.
If these amendments pass, Christie should never attempt to take credit for this advancement in our supreme law. It is because of him and those like him that this has taken so long.
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