The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune

There is always a hidden mischief with all Governments that hides the real truth from its citizens. Always a hidden agenda.

And so it is with the gender equality bill that is before Parliament. Are we under attack? Are we being pressured by other countries? Are we a sovereign nation? Our Government yields to outside pressure too quickly.

But surely the Lord God does nothing, unless he reveals his secret to his servants, the prophets. We have got to wake up: this time the people really have the power, and the government has to listen to the results of the X that the people will speak with.

The Referendum on Gender Equality is not what it seems. If so much as one of the four bills on gender equality passes (it does not matter which one) the rights we enjoy as Christians and as Bahamians will end forever.

The problem with the referendum is not with the Bills themselves but with the facts surrounding those Bills that Bahamians are not being told about. But, in 2002, the Government signed a treaty called the Economic Partnership Agreement which allowed millions of foreign persons (corporate and individuals) to come into The Bahamas and remain. People could stay only for three months if they held shares in one of the companies here, otherwise government retained the rights to treat them as usual. Foreign companies, however, retained the right to stay here indefinitely in unlimited numbers.

The effect of this, of course, is that The Bahamas will have here more foreign persons (especially companies) than Bahamians so that we become a minority in our own land. None of the seminars on Gender Equality address this problem, which will take effect once the government passes the legislation to give effect to the treaty in 2019.

The problem this raises is that Article 1 of our Constitution says that the Commonwealth of The Bahamas shall be a sovereign, democratic state. As democracy requires the majority will to prevail, the foreign companies will eventually have authority over our people with the attendant powers of passing such laws as they please, including the power to pass gay marriage laws if that so pleases them. This means that our sovereignty is now in question and that the Treaty has raised the issue as to whether or not we are fully sovereign.

This is not the first time questions like these have been raised with a Free Trade Agreement. The European Economic Community raises the same or similar issues as well for Europeans and it is understood that Europeans have given up their sovereignty to become a part of the Union. The difficulty between us and them, however, is that none of them were made to change their identities as a people during the period their sovereignty was called into question. The Bahamas is the only nation presently doing so.

What is the effect of changing one’s identity from the 1973 Bahamian created by Sir Lynden and Sir Milo and becoming a 2016 Bahamian created by the present government? The 1973 Bahamian came into being under a fully sovereign state. This modern Bahamian comes into existence while a possibility non-sovereign government operates in The Bahamas.

What is worse is that the question as to whether the government is fully sovereign or not cannot even be answered by our courts as the question is created by a Treaty which no court has power to look into. That means the question as to whether we can even create a new Bahamian right is not a question that a court in the Bahamas can answer and it may have to be left to foreign courts to answer that question. For these reasons, a yes vote on any of the Bills puts the existence of the Bahamas in jeopardy as it means that should a foreign court decide that the Treaty does put into doubt the sovereignty of the Bahamas at present, then it means that the existence of the new Bahamian must necessarily be put into doubt as well.

For all the above reasons we are asking everyone to vote no on all of the Bills until these questions are answered by the international community, including the United Nations and the European Union and CARIFORUM states which participated in the Treaty.

BISHOP LESLIE R WOODSIDE

May 23, 2016