GLAAD calls on President Obama and media to address LGBT safety in Jamaica
By Ross Murray, Director of Programs, Global and US South |
April 3, 2015
GLAAD has joined 20 other LGBT and human rights organizations in urging President Obama to address the persecution of LGBT people in Jamaica during his upcoming visit to the country. President Obama will meet with leaders from the Caribbean Community, and with Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller. The intention of the meeting is to discuss the United States' partnership with the region, including through the administration's Caribbean Energy Security Initiative.
Highlights of the letter include:
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Across the Caribbean, activists and civil society groups are working to combat and respond to violence and discrimination against the LGBT community. These activists perform tireless work in challenging climates; in many Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, consensual adult sexual acts are criminalized and these laws often serve to justify and legitimize discrimination and violence against LGBT persons.
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A meeting with activists working for the rights of the LGBT community, as well as others advocating for human rights in Jamaica, would underscore your administration’s commitment to full equality and human rights and highlight the leading role that these organizations play in bettering their societies.
Read the full text of the letter here.
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The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?
"Brian wears sunglasses to hide his gray and lifeless left eye—damaged, he says, by kicks and blows with a board from Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton. Brian, 44, is gay, and Banton, 32, is an avowed homophobe whose song Boom Bye-Bye decrees that gays "haffi dead" ("have to die"
. In June 2004, Brian claims, Banton and some toughs burst into his house near Banton's Kingston recording studio and viciously beat him and five other men. After complaints from international human-rights groups, Banton was finally charged last fall, but in January a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. It was a bitter decision for Brian, who lost his landscaping business after the attack and is fearful of giving his last name. "I still go to church," he says as he sips a Red Stripe beer. "Every Sunday I ask why this happened to me."
Though familiar to Americans primarily as a laid-back beach destination, Jamaica is hardly idyllic. The country has the world's highest murder rate. And its rampant violence against gays and lesbians has prompted human-rights groups to confer another ugly distinction: the most homophobic place on earth.
In the past two years, two of the island's most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson's mutilated body. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. In 2004, a teen was almost killed when his father learned his son was gay and invited a group to lynch the boy at his school. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. And this year a Kingston man, Nokia Cowan, drowned after a crowd shouting "batty boy" (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) chased him off a pier. "Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen," says Rebecca Schleifer of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and author of a scathing report on the island's anti-gay hostility."
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1182991,00.html