The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

LOCAL lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists and experts said Friday’s landmark US Supreme Court decision to legalise same-sex marriage nationwide will have a mixed impact on the movement here in The Bahamas.

“There will be both negative and positive effects,” activist Erin Greene said when contacted for comment yesterday. “What is most important is that we engage these global and local cultural shifts as a democratic society that recognises that every citizen should be granted equal and equitable access to the enjoyment of all human rights and all civil rights that the state offers.”

Dr Peter Bailey, a College of the Bahamas English professor who specialises in Victorian, feminist, sexuality and gender studies, agreed that the local impact of the US Supreme Court decision will be mixed but said changes in American society have provided a “blueprint, arguments and discourse for creating a Bahamian strategy for bringing such changes” here.

“The high profile of the US decision and the visibility of LGBT individuals in America will cause some conservative elements to fervently deny, restrict or retract rights that the Bahamian LGBT community has or desires,” he told The Tribune. “However, the visibility of people marrying, raising children, and living law abiding, familiar, even boring domestic lives will probably cause local members of the LGBT community to seem entitled to justice and equality generally. Marriage confers respectability. Respectability can make people seem deserving of rights people would withhold from them.”

While some local observers speculate that the US decision will inevitably cause the Bahamas to follow suit, both Ms Greene and Dr Bailey acknowledged that at the moment, same-sex marriage is not a top priority for the local LGBT community.

“I suspect,” Dr Bailey said, “that insofar as there is an LGBT community, the goals and desires of that community, especially politically, are varied. Many of the activists working on these rights may feel that same-sex marriage is a goal best left deferred until less controversial goals such as anti-discrimination measures in the workplace are put into law. Others may feel that there is a progressive population of Bahamians, especially among the young who would support same-sex marriage. But when I look at message boards, online forums and in classrooms where these issues are discussed, overwhelmingly I see people saying that same-sex marriage is inevitable in the Bahamas, but that its time is perhaps a decade or two away.”

He added that pressure for the country to change its laws on LGBT issues will come from outsiders and Bahamians exposed to other countries.

“Bahamians of all sexual orientations travel,” he said. “They go to America, Canada, the UK, Mexico...various countries in Europe – and they go to college and live there and come back with ideas from those places. As same-sex marriage becomes normalised in those places, and Bahamians work, school, travel and live there, I think you will see a gradual tolerance for same-sex marriage in the Bahamas rising. Especially if Bahamians come to see marriage as not only a religious institution but a civil one, and if they are assured that no church is compelled to perform or approve of same-sex marriages.”

For Ms Greene, praise for the US Supreme Court’s decision and that country’s advancements on the issue did not come without reservations.

“While I celebrate with Americans on the ground-breaking marriage equality decision,” Ms Greene said, “as a human rights advocate I cannot acknowledge this achievement without also acknowledging that the vast majority of the LGBT community in the USA still face housing and employment discrimination, difficulty accessing medical services and are routinely abused by police officers and state and federal agents and, in particular, that 226 transgender Americans were killed in 2014, with the majority of these individuals being people of colour.”