Dear Editor,
We collectively owe a debt of gratitude to the 46 percent of citizens who exercised a fundamental right guaranteed to all of us under the constitution and voted in the recent referendum.
As free participants in our democracy we make collective decisions that bind us all. We accept the results and move on. But in this case, move on to what?
Some used their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote to effectively bar the door denying certain other rights to our brothers and sisters. Many were motivated by bigotry, and hatred.
The politics of the matter must be shunted to the side as we begin the process of dissecting how a fun-loving people who would without hesitation feed a total stranger; a people who daily break the law in order to do right by another group of law-breakers (illegal aliens) because they perceive it to be in the spirit of brotherhood and Christian charity to do so, would so callously deny equality to their own children and grandchildren.
Some of these people bowed their heads in reverence on June 5 at places of worship and then two days later proudly dispensed with age-old teachings to do unto others and voted to say that women are not equal to men; fornicating men deserve to go to hell and take their out-of-wedlock children with them; and that the dictionary definition of sex must be changed to mean gay marriage.
There is plenty of blame to go around but I completely reject the call from some quarters that the prime minister ought to resign because of the failure of this referendum. There are many, many other issues for which Perry Christie ought to consider resigning. This is not one of them.
A prime minister must never demit office for doing the right thing. It is his job to stand up for the rights of all citizens. He had a solemn duty to bring to the people and to promote an equality referendum.
What he must hang his head in shame for is his mind-numbing about-face in first supporting then flip-flopping to actively campaign against a similar referendum when it was brought by Hubert Ingraham in 2002, helping to ensure its defeat.
Certain pastors need to atone for the role they played in promoting hatred and driving divisiveness. And for what? Because they felt some obligation to promote biblical teachings on homosexuality (which was not in any of the referendum questions, despite what the conspiracy theorists might have us to believe)?
Other clerics supported the referendum questions, not on the noble basis of promoting equality but rather with the curious qualifier that a supposed back door to gay marriage would be locked down and battered shut by one of the questions.
I believe in the separation of church and state. Parliament must not pass any law telling church leaders who can and cannot get married in their sanctuaries. It is their right to impose whatever litmus test they can dream up to command of their faithful. That includes deciding whom they choose to allow to marry in their church. The government must never compel them to marry people of another faith, or gays, or black people, or left-handed people, for example.
But freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. We must always remember that marriage is first and foremost a civil contract overseen by the state, not the church. Clerics must seek authorization from the state, not from their religious elders to be able to perform a marriage. That is why no one is legally married until a duly sanctioned officer proclaims: "By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, I now pronounce you married", or words to that effect.
According to our laws, authorized public officials and others have the same right as the clergy to perform marriage. You are no less married if you did it in front of the registrar, as opposed to a pastor. And if you don't believe marriage is a civil contract, try ending one without going through a court.
Your pastor may give you spiritual counseling to help you through the ordeal, but only a judge can dissolve the legal contract. And so just as we were are all mixed up in this conch salad of hope and fear, common sense and irrationality, along came a neutral arbiter. Since we are a nation of laws, a gentle voice of sanity rose to speak to a group of people on the cusp of joining the legal fraternity.
Until a few weeks ago, few Bahamians could pick the president of the Court of Appeal, Dame Anita Allen, out of a line-up of legal luminaries. She spoke because the Eugene Dupuch Law School had invited here to address them, months ago. We got a totally dispassionate, fact and reason-based interpretation of the law from someone who studies and interprets the law for a living. She didn't bore her audience with her religious beliefs, and nobody left any wiser on what her personal feelings are towards gays. And it didn't matter. Justice was truly blind that night.
I don't accept, as has been suggested, that it took bravery for Dame Anita to go against the grain of society on this issue. It took a woman, in love with the rule of law, and sworn to dispensing it equally and fairly. That's not judicial activism. That's a belief that the law must remain relevant and fluid. Old Smokey Joe, the pen name for the namesake of the law school, would have been so proud of her at that moment.
Some may take up the gauntlet that Dame Anita threw down and run with it. Perhaps some brave souls will mount a court challenge to the marriage laws. If they do, they will be doing us all a favor by helping to drag us out of the stone age and in so doing begin the process of making ours a common wealth of equality and justice.
In the meantime, let us gird our loins and start re-laying the foundation for another chance to expand constitutional rights, not deny them. Globalization means that Bahamian women will continue to marry non-Bahamian men and will want their rights and their children's rights respected.
Bahamian men will continue to have out-of-wedlock children with non-Bahamian women and we must not turn our backs on these Bahamian (in every sense but legal) infants.
It is not if, but when, we try again, for try again we must. Basic human rights are too important to ever give up on. I suggest we start by encouraging openness. We must accept that we all know or have gay children, gay siblings, gay parents, gay teachers, politicians, lawyers, doctors, maids, taxi drivers, straw vendors and hair braiders. We love them already.
If a gay doctor is good enough to perform surgery on us, a gay lawyer is good enough to defend us in court, and a gay nurse good enough to bind our wounds, why are they not worthy of equal treatment by us?
A good conch salad tastes best when all the ingredients get equal treatment and neither the lime nor the onion is allowed to overpower the tomato or the conch.
- The Graduate
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