EDITOR, The Tribune

Pride Bahamas organiser Alexus D’Marco’s differences with the Bahamas Christian Council (BCC) are irreconcilable, especially given the fact that her organisation is planning on staging a gay pride event in 2020. Homosexuality is explicitly condemned in both Old and New Testaments. Unless D’Marco and her people are willing to repent, what is there to discuss?

As the moral conscience of the Bahamas, the BCC is well within its constitutional rights to voice its opposition to the said event. The irony of all this is Rights Bahamas’ condemnation of the Christian organisation for exercising its right to free speech. Apparently, the Christian community is not allowed the same privileges as the infinitesimal LGBT community that the oldest political party in The Bahamas, the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP), is now cowering before. With its recent endorsement of the gay event, the PLP is the first major political party to make such a risky move in a predominantly heterosexual and socially conservative country. This is political pandering at best. With such a tiny minority of potential voters who will have minimal impact on the 2022 general election, PLP strategists are misreading the political landscape.

The PLP has also betrayed its baptist heritage. Under the auspices of the legendary baptist clergyman, Rev Harcourt W Brown, Pastor of the historic Bethel Baptist Church, the baptist community played a vital role in the PLP achieving majority rule in 1967. It was Brown who gave the PLP its Exodus motif, arguing that the January 10, 1967 election date correlated with the biblical Exodus of Israel out of Pharaoh’s Egypt, which was held on the tenth day of the first month on the Hebrew sacred calendar some 1400 years before the birth of Christ. Brown was successful in portraying the United Bahamian Party as the Egyptians and Sir Lynden Pindling as the “Black Moses.” It was the Old Testament Moses who gave to the world God’s written prescriptive Moral Laws against homosexuality. The breaking of these laws has caused disastrous consequences to the LGBT community that it doesn’t want the wider Bahamian community to hear about.

Had Brown been living today, he would’ve undoubtedly rebuked the PLP for betraying its baptist heritage.

KEVIN EVANS

Grand Bahama

November 24, 2019