The Tribune

“WHERE there is fear and doubt, then there is disaster,” said Opposition Leader Dr Hubert Minnis in the House yesterday as he seemed to back away from his party’s promised full support of the constitutional reforms needed to give Bahamian women equal civil rights with their men.

Dr Minnis was justified in his desire not to make hurried decisions that could spell disaster for a future generation. While well intentioned, this does not mean that the referendum should be either postponed or allowed to fail.

Crisis Centre Director Dr Sandra Dean Patterson urged Dr Minnis not to turn the November 6 referendum into the political football that it became in the hands of the PLP opposition, led by Mr Christie, in 2002.

“For us in the trenches at the Crisis Centre,” she said, “where we see the silent victims who suffer as a consequence of gender based discrimination and inequality, this is a time for us to make a difference. This is a time for us not to be distracted by the naysayers and not to be distracted by the calls about same sex marriage.

“This is about men and women as equal and working together on having the same opportunities to pass citizenship onto their children, the same opportunity to live lives free from violence,” she added.

She urged both Prime Minister Perry Christie and Dr Minnis to “hold fast to the helm”, and not to be distracted or deterred by politics.

“I would challenge Dr Minnis not to lose the momentum he had when this bill was first mentioned (three) weeks ago,” Dr Patterson said.

However, yesterday’s debate revealed much ignorance of the problems even among the legislators who have been given the responsibility of rectifying them. Some of the politicians have been either callously indifferent or unaware of the suffering inflicted on Bahamian families over the years. Many families were split up if a Bahamian wife, an FNM, failed to vote PLP. She either lost her job as happened to several in Alice Town, Eleuthera, or her husband — as happened in Inagua when an Inagua woman’s Turks Island husband was sent back to Turks Island because she failed to support the PLP candidate of that time. That was a particularly brutal case when Morton Salt took compassion on the family and hired the husband aboard one of its ships so that whenever the ship docked in Inagua, the couple and their children could steal a short time together. In Alice Town, Eleuthera, grown children of women who were fired from Hatchet Bay farms by their Bahamian overseer with words to the effect that those who did not support the PLP government would not be fed by that government — still bear grudges, not only against the overseer, now dead, but his PLP bosses.

It is amazing how many young people during that period were heard expressing bitter hatred against the PLP and declaring that they would never vote PLP because of the way their parents were victimised. What is even more amazing is that even today, we now hear the grandchildren expressing the same sentiments, but with even greater bitterness. One would have thought that time, the great healer of all things, would have soon erased the memories. However, among certain families the bitterness seems to have grown with the passage of time.

The basis of the problem is that the Bahamian woman, who does not have the same rights as her male counterpart, is vulnerable and is taken advantage of.

This time, the amendments have to be fair in giving equal rights, and they must be so worded as not to leave loopholes through which a politician can inject his venom to suit his own political bias.

Today, Prime Minister Christie wants to blame the churches for the 2002 failure. He claimed that they did not give their support because they were not consulted by the Ingraham government. It would seem that he would have us believe that the church put its hurt feelings before the interests of its congregations. If that is so, then these churchmen were unworthy leaders.

In fact, it was then that we discovered how weak the Christian Council was and because of its system of representation did not give a true picture of the churches of the Bahamas.

At the time, then Christian Council president Samuel Green accused the Ingraham government of not having sufficient consultation with the people before setting a date for the referendum. However, some of his own Christian Council members turned on him, accusing him of never calling a meeting and of never consulting the Council on the matter.

While the Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians felt that a “yes” vote for the amendments would improve the quality of the lives of their congregations, they did to not have enough votes to make their voices heard. They each had two votes in the Council, while the Baptists, with so many independent churches within their group, had “too many votes to count,” scoffed an Anglican clergyman.

Many of the clergymen with whom we talked at the time, could not find the “moral issues” that they were supposed to be discussing, they only saw the politics.

So really even today the Christian Council cannot be considered the voice of the Church in the Bahamas.

And even though Mr Ingraham had given the Opposition plenty of time to get their act together, had impressed upon them that he did not want the matter politicised, but wanted the opposition as full participants so that they could announce to the country that “we the parliamentarians have agreed to…”

They went to parliament, and the Christie opposition disagreed with many items. Every item that they rejected the Ingraham government dropped for the sake of unanimity.

When it came time in the House to vote on the constitutional reforms the record shows that all MPs — government and opposition — voted unanimously in favour of the questions to be put to the people.

But at his first town meeting to help inform the public, Mr Christie made this alarming pronouncement: “If I knew then what I know now, I almost certainly would have taken a different position on the bills.”

And then one of his followers, a former attorney general no less, having also voted ”yes” in the House, voted “no” in the referendum, encouraging as many voters as he could to follow his example. He then went further with his insults by admitting that it was only two to three days after his vote in parliament that he was able to ”sit down and go over” one of the questions. He even had the nerve to complain of poor drafting.

Not only were they playing politics, but instead of uplifting Bahamian women by giving them the same rights as their male counterparts, they used them as stepping stones to get into parliament.

It would be a shame if history should now repeat itself. After it was all over in 2002, it was Mr Christie who had privately boasted that it was a future referendum that only he could win. It is now up to him to win it. As for Dr Minnis and his small band, their duty is to keep his feet to the fire to make certain that he at least delivers on this promise.