As a citizen, I insist on registering my disgust at Mrs Camille Robinson-Regis who is behaving overtly unethically when, on the hustings, at an emotionally charged political meeting, she encourages the mob to “pray the St Michael’s prayer” against the UNC and its political candidates.
What makes her behaviour even more contemptible is that she went to the unbelievable extreme of leading her listeners in the St Michael’s prayer – a Catholic prayer of exorcism that invokes St Michael the Archangel to cast Satan into hell! (Newsday, 23.11.19). This lady is making light of serious business! She is here instigating in a not so subtle manner, religious fear, religious stereotyping, and bigoted religious intolerance and disrespect for the sole purpose of gaining victory in an election.
What she has done is no different from, and indeed is far worse than what her Tobagonian PNM colleague did when he invoked the threatening image of a “Calcutta ship” on its way to Tobago to ensnare the people of that island.
Has Mr Bishnu Ragoonath or his watchdog group not heard her? Or has he heard her and is deliberately ignoring the gutter politics in which this high-ranking PNM politician—and a woman, a mother and matriarch mind you—is willing to indulge a gullible mob to whom she is “preaching.”
She ought to be ashamed of her behaviour and apologise to the nation! What is even worse, is that Mrs Robinson-Regis made certain that her religious profanity reached the ears of those who fell on the fringes of Catholicism and who might be practitioners of something that is admixed to this religion but one that is none-the-less “creole” in its leaning, “voodoo” perhaps, by making reference to rituals involving “holy water” and the use of “salt and a cocoyea broom.”
This is scandalously crass, irreligious, and classless bigotry from someone who should see herself as a role model and mentor in our society.
Worse yet, her listeners jeered and cheered! What a truly pitiful state of affairs! This is behaviour that speaks volumes for our stunted collective cultural and bigoted mindset! Behaviour like Robinson-Regis’ makes me wonder whether the acronym PNM stands for “Particularly Nasty Mentality!”
This is nothing but a thinly-veiled religious “hate-speech!”