The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Yesterday was a difficult day. There have been quite a number of “low” days in the House of Assembly in recent times when the behaviour of Members on both sides, failed to meet even the most basic of standards of conduct expected of parliamentarians in our tradition.

Yesterday may have sadly topped all previous ‘low’ days. First the Speaker of the House debased his office reading a churlish and juvenile statement seeking to justify his suspension of a Member.

The written statement included veiled and blatant insults aimed at Members of Parliament who are members of the Official Opposition.

Whether one agreed with and supported the Speaker’s ruling on the suspension in question or not, no one ought to support the disgraceful language used by the Speaker nor should we be expected to accept his horrible bias against foreign-born citizens of The Bahamas and homosexuals.

Naturalized citizens are entitled to and hold all of the rights and privileges accorded to citizens born in The Bahamas. We are all Bahamians!

The Bahamas was among the earliest of Commonwealth Caribbean countries to decriminalize homosexuality in 1990. It is unconscionable that a Speaker of the House of Assembly would seek to insult a citizen on the basis of his or her sexual preference.

The Speaker owes an apology to the Bahamian people and to those he insulted from the Chair.

The offensiveness of the Speaker’s written premeditated remarks was aggravated by the hapless defence of his action by virtually all members of the Government present in the House of Assembly.

Perhaps the most offensive however was that of the Member of Parliament for MICAL who sought to justify the suspension from Parliament of the Member from Englerston not because she had broken some parliamentary rule but because she was “behaving like a man” and hence getting manhandled.

She then chose to justify the “manhandling” of the Member by the Speaker with the violent analogy of a man who might be justified in physically abusing his wife.

To say that the Member for MICAL statements distresses me does not adequately explain my disillusionment and disappointment. I am now aware that the MP has issued an apology and claims that her thoughts were poorly expressed and taken out of context, for which she apologizes.

She must do more than issue an apology. The MP for MICAL needs to understand and accept that physical abuse of another person is never acceptable, never justified and never excused.

The MICAL MP must demonstrate in her words, conduct and work as an MP that violence in the home, whether against a spouse or a child, is similarly never acceptable, never justified and never excusable.

Dissatisfied and Saddened FNM

Nassau,

February 8, 2018.