By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Staff Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMAS Christian Council President Rev Ranford Patterson yesterday accused Bahamians of being “too passive” upon learning of the establishment of a local porn industry.

Rev Patterson said the council would continue to advocate against anything that will have a negative impact on the family or individual Bahamian, and emphasised that the council has the same influence, and relevance, as it did during the country’s formative years.

Rev Patterson said: “Bahamian people must get to the point where we take a stand as a people and say this is not what we want, and because it’s not what we want we will do everything in our power to stop it. Until we get to that point as a people, anything that happens anywhere in the world will continue to happen in The Bahamas.

“We are too passive as a people, we must take a stand. There must be some things that we are not for, and not prepared to support, and if we’re not prepared to support it we should say it. Let those who are in authority know of our position.”

Concerns were raised this week when ZNS announced that it would air a special report on porn in the Bahamas next week.

Yesterday, Rev Patterson said he was unaware that there was a local industry.

He lamented that media coverage would only drive more people to view pornographic content out of curiosity.

“I haven’t seen it,” said Rev Patterson, “this is the first time I’ve heard of it. The only thing we can continue to do is teach our people that some things are not good for us as a country. If the regulators are not prepared to take a stand and stop some things, it’s not very much that we can do and we have been agitating on our part to minimise or alleviate the porn thing on the cable.

“We got push back from everywhere, people are saying why are we doing it, what is the purpose of doing it?”

Two years ago the council issued recommendations to the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) on the draft Code of Practice for Content Regulation that called for a ban on pornographic movies from Cable Bahamas’ channel programming.

Findings came from viewing the titles and explicit content on a senior citizen’s basic cable package, according to the council, adding that the nation’s decency and standards will erode over time due to the showing of such TV shows.

Other recommendations made by the council included a revisit of the down time on television when explicit content may be shown.

The council has often taken an unpopular stance on many issues; however, Rev Patterson said the religious body’s relevance was based on their actions and not results.

He said: “We’ve always been the way we are, we deal with issues that we believe affect our people socially in this country. Whether they accept what we say or not, we have always dealt with them – with the gambling for example, we dealt with it. Whether the government follows through on what the people of the Bahamas decided that we want them to do or not, the reality is we did our job. So the relevancy is not based on what happens at the end of the day, the relevancy is what do we do to get the people of the country to think about what we are doing and to respond to it. How the government responds has nothing to do with us.”

When asked whether or not he felt that the religious body was representative of the Christian community, Rev Patterson said the council has registered up to 90 per cent of the denominations active in the country.

He noted that convicted sex offender Randy Fraser’s new church was not registered and that there was no application pending from Palms of Victory Kingdom Ministry.

“The challenge we have, however, is that we have a lot of independent churches who are not members of the Christian Council that we have no oversight on. So when things happen in these independent churches the first question that is asked is what is the Christian Council doing, but we have no control over what they do. People have a right to association, a right to worship, a right to do as they please.”