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Last Updated: Feb 6, 2017 - 2:32:04 PM |
This past week
The Nassau Guardian
published statements by Deputy Prime Minister, Brent Symonette, confirming
that
the
Bahamian government had signed on to a United Nations resolution highlighting
and calling for action to be taken concerning the discrimination faced
by members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community
across the globe
. For many
of you this may have come as a complete surprise. Indeed, I’m sure
some of you are at this very moment wondering how God will dispense
his awesome justice in the face of such bold disobedience. Will he go
old school and give us the seven plagues of Egypt? Will he exhibit continuity
and stick with the fire and brimstone, subjecting us to the same furious
end Sodom and Gomorrah suffered? Perhaps we’ll have an extra busy
hurricane season this year? Or worse, will this prove to be the final
nail in the coffin of Bahamian heathens everywhere on that righteous
conveyor belt to the ever-burning crematorium…also known as Hell?
Certainly, even the Bahamian sandstones will cry out because of the
significance of this offence. In all honesty I doubt it.
Before I go any further, I have
to give credit where credit is due. This opinion piece was inspired
by Deno. Who is Deno you ask? Deno left a comment at the end of
The
Nassau Guardian article assuring you and I, and everyone else who
would read it, that the end is neigh because the Bahamian government
has chosen to defend the right of people who are different from the
majority, and who’ve been subjected to summary executions, physical
violence, severe verbal abuse, narrowed opportunities, restricted civil
rights and inadequate civil protections throughout history and even
still today. For Deno, this is a breakdown of the Bahamian moral conscience
and a sad day in our history. Curiously enough, Deno didn’t think
it important to let us all know that the death of this
young mother shot in the
head in Grand Bahama
might
also suggest that something was drastically wrong with the path that
we’re going down.
I would be careless if I didn’t
point out that women have in the past, and yes still today, suffer much
of the same abuses members of the LGBT community have experienced. No
matter, Deno’s line of reasoning is actually not all that novel. There
are indeed others who’ve felt the same way. As American Rep. Seaborn
Roddenbery is quoted as saying, “[it] is repulsive and averse to every
sentiment of pure American spirit... It is subversive of social peace.
It is destructive of moral supremacy…” Both statements sound pretty
similar, except Rep. Roddenbery made that statement in 1912 and he was
talking about
interracial marriage. Advocates of slavery believed
the world would end if blacks were set free, and when women were given
the right to vote and allowances to work some men warned of absolute
chaos and were certain of God’s retribution then. Do we feel comfortable
joining a long line of bigoted drama queens who’ve been proclaiming
impending doom in the face of any kind of change in the status quo since
time immemorial?
Or would we feel safer in the company
of the countries who opposed the United Nations resolution? Russia is
known for suppressing opposition and murdering journalist who refuse to
tow the State line. China has a similar reputation along with a myriad
of other human rights violations and forced, dictatorial communism.
In Saudi Arabia women can’t even obtain a drivers license and Nigeria
is a country best known for its internet scams, sectarian violence,
inflation and extra-judicial killings by security forces. Is this the
company we’d like to be in?
Alas, Deno is unable to defend
himself and I’m no bully, so let’s get to the heart of the matter,
shall we? What I’m trying to get at is that I find it peculiar that
people fret about the wrath God when the gays are involved—whether
it comes in the form of tornadoes (like the ones in Nassau recently),
no crabs walking or a slow lobster season—yet remain silent when sins
that hit closer to home bubble to the surface. No one in the bars or
churches are talking about how increased rates of domestic violence
in the Bahamas signal an impending end, invoking God’s righteous fire.
I would wager my less than significant fortune that if the United Nations
tabled a resolution to defend the rights of those who’ve fornicated
to have access to equal job opportunities, housing or to walk the streets
without being beaten to death, there wouldn’t be much of a row. Given
how freely Bahamian men and women exercise their God-given right to
commit adultery; I can easily imagine vast opposition to a law that
would criminalize “sweet-hearting”. And I’m a frequent clubber
and bar patron; I’ve seen the “p****popping” and the “daggering”—all
sexual public displays of pornographic proportions reminiscent of Babylonian
debauchery. Stop passing the buck. If God is busy looking for a reason
to end us either he hasn’t been paying attention or he is
wildly
inefficient.
Let’s cut the foolishness. In
the end, this isn’t about gay or straight, it isn’t about whose
sin beats whose, and it isn’t about your Bible. This is about hypocrisy,
delusions of innocence, the remnants of a sordid colonial past and a
politics of oppression that people—themselves once and
still
oppressed—have decided to embrace as their own. Christians forget
their own history, the executions, abuses and torture they suffered
at the hands of the Roman Empire as a little known, small religious
sect on the margins of Roman society. Even today Christians are a minority
comprising only one-third of the world’s population. Imagine the rest
of the world’s 4 billion people deciding that Christians, because
they are a minority and worship differently, couldn’t have the same
rights as those in the majority. And isn’t there something in that
Bible of yours about not judging or not casting stones or something?
But let’s face it; I’m obviously not claiming to be a Biblical scholar
here.
No, what I am is ashamed. I find it
contemptible and vile that people are so comfortable sitting in their
glass houses passing judgment on others, using their Bibles and passively
adopting legal precedent from colonial masters to justify their arguments;
colonial masters who themselves thought it justified to outlaw interracial
marriage but never prosecuted the rape of black slave women. While our
ancestors were being taught the good news of God’s love at the business
end of a musket rifle and a whip,
European
colonial powers were dismantling
inclusive
kinship structures native to many African
communities
. No one wants
to talk about that though, it only seems complicates the story.
Yes, members of the LGBT community
are different. Perhaps, you don’t want to fathom their difference
and even thinking about it may make your skin crawl. If this describes
how you feel then I have a suggestion: try your best not to be gay and
you won’t have a thing to worry about. In the meantime, I believe
that your inability to understand or relate to a person’s customs,
religion or sexuality does not in turn give you the right to marginalize
them. I believe that we should build a community that is inclusive rather
than exclusive. I want to believe that a person’s humanity outweighs
any other factor and that this alone gives them the right to have a
chance at a happy life—a right to equal and adequate opportunities
for safety, education, housing, health care and employment. I want to
believe that no matter a person’s skin color, genitalia or where they
put said genitalia (in relation to a consenting adult, of course) that
our society has the capacity to be broad enough to embrace
all
Bahamians—heterosexual or otherwise. Maybe this belief is misplaced
but that doesn’t mean I’m going stop believing. None of this tells
me that the end is near; rather the Bahamian government gave me reason
to hope last week that what might actually be down the road is a brighter,
more inclusive future for all.
Joey Gaskins is
a graduate of Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY with a BA in Politics. He is
currently studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science
(LSE) where he hopes to attain his
MSc in Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies and go on to pursue
a Doctoral Degree. Joey also writes for
the Nassau
Liberal
www.nassauliberal.
webs.com
. You can reach him at
j.gaskins@lse.ac.uk
]
© Copyright 2011 by thebahamasweekly.com
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