Last week at the UWI Cave Hill campus, our Prime Minister reflected publicly on her time there 28 years ago when her "ideas of development, politics and liberty were transformed" and her mind "opened...to broader thinking, at times daring us to be bold enough to think differently, by leaving behind the rigidity of traditionalism."
But her address concluded with a display of precisely the opposite. One of just four questions she was asked focused on public policy and homosexuality, after her Barbadian questioner saluted her for championing another misunderstood minority, people with disabilities.
Homosexuality is an issue Ms Persad-Bissessar seems willing to address only when she is engaged by foreigners, not the lesbian and gay citizens who voted for the People's Partnership and who have written her on the matter in the hundreds. A testament to homosexuality's salience for Caribbean governance is that it is currently a matter of constitutional and rights claims in four Caribbean courts and was the note on which her Belizean counterpart chose to close his Independence Day address.
Sadly, Ms Persad-Bissessar's response was to brand the equality and citizenship of some 35,000 lesbian and gay Trinbagonians "a politically charged question."But human rights aren't political; they are matters for moral leadership–which she failed to show.
"We cannot do anything until the people are in agreement," she told young students.
If every group's humanity and dignity were a matter for consensus, few minorities would enjoy them. And if others had held that view and had not taken leadership to make change, I would be enslaved, Hindus still marginalised, and an Indian girl from Penal and Siparia would not be our nation's sixth prime minister. It was yet another lost opportunity for her to show mettle.But 85 per cent of the T&T public, a reputable pollster says, do not support discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Madam PM at the least could enact that consensus in the Equal Opportunity Act.
PP 2010 Voter