Let's get one thing out of the way early and move on. If all that was needed to assure the rights of all people in T&T was the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment, then there would be no need for a host of complementary laws including the Equal Opportunity Act (EOA) and other legislation asserting the rights of individuals and specific groups of people under different circumstances.
For example, if "sexual orientation" does not really require specific mention in the EOA because it is already covered in the Constitution, it should follow that neither should race, ethnicity, origin, religion, marital status nor disability. There would also be no need for regulatory expression of conventions on workers' rights, the rights of migrants, the disabled and the rights of the little people we call children.
The reason for this is understandable since the words "all" and "everyone" are not always understood by everybody. This ought to have been clear throughout the close to 70 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but has not been the case. For this and other reasons, specific protections and enabling conditions are entirely necessary.
Additionally, the discussion on "sexual orientation" has gone way beyond a focus on people's behaviour, including the way they express affection for each other, and in the direction of a discourse on whether the notion of "gender" does not itself require a fundamental reformulation of prior binary articulations.
Sadly, even as a rather sophisticated discussion has ensued on this question elsewhere, politicians here and in other countries of the English-speaking Caribbean have insisted on maintaining a status quo rooted more in theological dictat than in a compulsion to uphold rights.
The recent CCJ case of Maurice Tomlinson versus the governments of T&T and Belize, while going against the claimant, was useful in capturing some of the internal contradictions of official obstinacy on the question of what is essentially a matter of core principles such as the inalienability of human rights.
Quite remarkably, even as attorneys for T&T argued that the Immigration Act's inclusion of "homosexuals" among the law's "prohibited classes" had caused no harm to anyone, it was clear, based on the ruling of the Court that the provision served to further institutionalise discrimination against a particular class of human being identified not only by what they do, but who they are.
During the conduct of the case, T&T pointed to measures in place to mitigate the possibility of discrimination against homosexuals by reference to the Constitution itself, the Extradition (Commonwealth and Foreign Territories) Act and the Data Protection Act which, the state argued, provides protection for the privacy of information related to one's sexual orientation or sexual life.
Non-legal people such as myself often find it hard to reconcile this kind of legislative schizophrenia. Well-paid, eminent counsel appeared to be saying: "Okay, so the laws in totality might be contradictory, but that's okay, the Immigration Act does apply not and has not been applied in that way so let's leave it as it is. We have other laws to take care of the anomaly if it becomes a problem." Application of common sense should certainly, in that instance I would assume, raise the question of why does the offending provision exist in the first place.
Worse yet, T&T argued that "administrative practice" has not included enforcement of this "prohibited classes" provision, a situation that has therefore apparently reflected an official policy of leniency on the subject.
Well, we need to get to the bottom of this. What indeed, is official policy here? The EOA might provide a clue through its explicit exclusion of "sexual orientation" as a basis for non-discrimination. Successive heads of the Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC), including the incumbent Lynette Seebaran-Suite, would understand the steepness of the uphill climb on this one.
There has also been a pattern of political double-speak on the issue based almost entirely on the fear of a largely Judeo-Christian religious backlash.
The state has been known to have successfully braved such confrontation on the issues of gambling, weekend business hours and the use and sale of alcohol. Yet, to cite just one angle on this (there are many more, I am not over-simplifying), the assertion that a penis inserted into the anus of another man by consent and in private constitutes a grievous act of spiritual wrong-doing has apparently sealed the deal on this one.
Out of this has emerged a hate agenda that has produced everything from passive-aggressive ostracism to outright support for violence and other attacks on the LGBT community.
Witness the Caribbean responses, official and otherwise, to the Orlando massacre and you will have a sampling of the entire spectrum of hate agenda expression. Genteel religious commentary masks the murderous intent of a creed which claims to promote hatred for the things people do and not for the people themselves, yet sets its sights not only on what people do, but who they are.
I suppose all of this takes us light years away from any acknowledgement of the fact, deemed inconvenient and untimely even by some LGBT activists, that the right of everyone to enjoyment of what society offers necessarily includes a right to marry and to have access to corresponding rights under such a relationship.
This does not necessarily include a coercive relationship with religious marriage officers and I would not support such an injunction, since it would be important to prove to the zealots that civil liberties can be observed without negative implications for other rights.
This is something people of the hate agenda need to learn. As of now, they simply don't get it.