The Tribune

By RUPERT MISSICK Jr

MOVING to end gender discrimination in the Bahamian Constitution would be correcting “one of the worst offences that the PLP perpetrated against half of the county’s population”, FNM deputy leader Loretta Butler-Turner told The Tribune.

Mrs Butler-Turner’s comments comes as the November deadline for the current government’s proposed referendum to change the Bahamian Constitution draws closer.

Nine months after it was formed by the government, the Constitutional Commission submitted its report on July 8, in time for the 40th anniversary of independence.

Prime Minister Perry Christie gave the commission a broad mandate to conduct a comprehensive review of the Constitution of the Bahamas and recommend changes.

Once approved by the Cabinet and passed by the legislature, these changes will require a national referendum to be held so that the will of the Bahamian people can be determined.

Sean McWeeney, a former Attorney General and leading member of the bar, chaired the commission, whose members were drawn from the legal fraternity, academia and civil society, including several Family Island representatives and community leaders.

The FNM deputy said that while the Commission’s report was “nicely compiled” and the government did a good public relations job, it lacked “new, earth-shattering revelations”.

“It speaks to the very same issues, barring one or two things, that we had on the very same referendum in 2002,” she said.

Mrs Butler-Turner called the PLP’s opposition to the 2002 Constitutional Referendum, which would have corrected the gender bias present in the Constitution more than a decade ago, a “great sin” .

The nation’s first referendum was held on February 27, 2002, and presented the electorate with five questions.

Voters were asked whether they approved of:

• The removal of gender discrimination from the constitution;

• The creation of a national commission to monitor the standards of teachers;

• The creation of an independent parliamentary commissioner;

• The creation of an independent election boundaries commission;

• The increase of the retirement ages of judges from 60 to 65 (or 68 to 72 for appellate judges).

All five questions were rejected by voters, with between 62.8 and 70.9 per cent voting against.

Even though she was not in frontline politics when the FNM’s referendum campaign began in 2001, Mrs Butler-Turner said that she was very involved in the party’s efforts to convince the electorate to make the changes.

It was the question of gender discrimination, however, that Mrs Butler-Turner was really passionate about.

“I realised that my daughter can be put in the same position other people’s daughters are in so when I took that argument from island to island with the FNM, I felt that if there was one question that could stand the test would be bringing equality to women of the Bahamas,” she said.

This “injustice” has been visited on her family, however: now Mrs Butler-Turner’s niece, and the great-granddaughter of one of the nation’s founding fathers, Sir Milo Butler, has to enter the Bahamas on a visitor’s visa.

“This is my sister’s daughter, a woman with a Bahamian mother. It doesn’t just have to reach home for me, we have thousands of Bahamians who are unable to come and contribute to build our society because of this injustice,” Mrs Butler-Turner said.