Barbados official says gays should be ‘left alone’ despite sodomy law
The Attorney General of Barbados has said that the country should protect gay people – even though gay sex is still technically illegal.
Barbados law specifies that the punishment for male ‘buggery’ is life imprisonment, though the law is not regularly enforced.
The ban initially dates back to the British colonial era, though it was codified into the country’s 1992’s Sexual Offences Act.
But despite the law, the country’s Attorney General claims gay people should be protected.
According to local newspaper Barbados Today, Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite said: “As a lawmaker, if Jane decides she wants to live with Janice, that is their business as far I am concerned.
“But I will not change the law to allow them to be married in Barbados.
“I will not stop them from being able to access health care, being able to have a job, or to be able to eat and sleep and do all the things I do.
“We are going to have decide as a country if this is so fundamental to our way of life as a country that we are willing to uphold it and deal with the consequences thereof.”
The country’s buggery law specifically targets gay men – and not lesbians as in his example.
Ambrose Carter of the anti-LGBT Pure Sex Centre, told the newspaper that the gay activists are exploiting ‘one-off’ homophobic beatings to call for rights.
Carter said: “When you get these one-off incidents where a gay may have been beaten or something, people want to blow these things out of proportion for their own gain and it is not right to us as a country.
“Individuals have lived here even though there are no laws sanctioning [homosexuality] on the law books. All of us know of gays living as man and woman, or man and man or woman and woman living safe for eons.”
