Said the legendary wise old man: “You cannot know what another man is thinking until he opens his mouth to speak.” Nevertheless, many people imagine themselves capable of reading minds when unwittingly they put into words their own secret thoughts. How often do men conveniently misjudge a woman’s silence? I dare to say, too often. At great cost to ourselves, we habitually misread silence as acquiescence. On the other hand, words are not always to be trusted. Not when man was cursed from Creation to hear only what he wants to hear and to recognize only such truths as echo his own.
Wrote the actress Shirley MacClaine: “It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he’s in love, drunk or running for office.” Speaking of politicians, even when they’ve had one drink too many, the majority would acknowledge the people’s constitutional right to dissent. Nothing in the definition of the word is indicative of lawlessness or treason or lack of patriotism. Indeed, a nation cannot legitimately consider itself free if it is without the right of dissent. The right to criticize government policy is considered sacred by free societies; a right worth dying for.
To borrow from Roosevelt’s related statement in 1918: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public.” Today more than ever, the quoted declaration by the 32nd President of the United States is supported by fellow Americans, all of whom, regardless of political leaning, subscribe to the view that “those who accuse the dissenters of being unpatriotic are themselves unpatriotic. The very act of free speech is patriotic, as is the right given to us in the Constitution. People who want to take that right away because they do not like what is being said are violating the Constitution and are borderline fascist.”
On the 25th of November 2003, parliament debated amendments to The Revised Criminal Code of Saint Lucia, including the denial of bail to citizens accused of murder and rape, and the restricting of free speech via an iron gag called Section 361. Forever the school principal, this was how the prime minister, Kenny Anthony, addressed his imagined classroom on the church’s position on abortion: “My attitude would have been to say to those who do not see eye to eye with us, ‘You have a different point of view, can we please meet and discuss the issue and see if we can resolve it?’ The church as an institution must tolerate and understand dissent.”
Pointless going into the pros and cons of Roman Catholic theology and policy. The prime minister’s assault on the reputation of Father Clovis was not only regrettable, but it is also contrary to the rules of the House Standing Rules and Orders that forbid attacks on private individuals, priests included. Elected lawmakers breaking the laws they swore to protect, is not only autocratic, arrogant and counterproductive, it has also become commonplace in Saint Lucia. Nevertheless, I am on this occasion more concerned with the words that laid bare the advertised sinless soul of the earlier quoted stone thrower.
What could he possibly have meant when he advised the church to tolerate and understand dissent among its flock? This was how he explained himself: “In my government I tolerate dissent—up to a point. I allow dissent because I recognize that sometimes it can be healthy. But there is no room for arrogance in the leadership of the church, and that is the problem. Moral absolutes, if you cannot handle them, will lead you into that kind of profile . . . We have to manage differences. We have to manage dissent.” Judge, jury and execution.
In his blatant attack on “the leadership of the church,” by which, conceivably, he also referred to the Pope—if not to the collective church’s putative head Jesus Christ—the prime minister missed the point. Father Clovis and his followers adhere to the dictates of a faith shared by the majority of Saint Lucians. The Catholic church has always considered abortion evil and the Constitution of Saint Lucia entitles them to hold such belief. For members of parliament to openly attack religious beliefs in the venomous fashion demonstrated on the recalled occasion by the day’s prime minister was not only to establish a precedent most regrettable but also unconstitutional—a fact that must’ve occurred to Kenny Anthony, considering he is a decorated student of Constitutional Law.
In all events, it is not for any prime minister to “allow and tolerate” constitutionally guaranteed dissent. How revealing that from one corner of his erudite mouth the prime minister seemed to be advocating tolerance of church dissenters by their leaders—even as he demonstrated his own intolerance of such leaders. What else but palpable arrogance was the prime minister’s suggestion that, Constitution be damned, he alone decides the degree of dissent permissible in this democratic country of ours? What emerges from re-reading the 25 November 2003 Hansard is a picture most disturbing. It should be required reading for any Saint Lucian who imagines himself patriotic.
Space prevents me on this outing from reminding readers of what passed for a House debate at the time of Section 166 in November 2003. Suffice it to say Sarah Flood-Beaubrun was crucified by her parliamentary colleagues, including the only other female MP, a Seventh Day Adventist paragon. It is also worth pointing out that in her “defense of the rights of the unborn child” Flood-Beaubrun never once cited church dogma, or God for that matter, more than can truthfully be said of her conceivably irreligious colleagues who seemed to concentrate their venom on the Catholic church and its right-to-life position.
More on that at a later date. I now offer yet another example of Kenny Anthony’s manipulation of words that, had they been spoken by anyone else, would’ve amounted to an egregious abuse of House privilege. At any rate, as measured by parliament’s self-crowned monarch.
Having implied that between 2000 and 2001 there had been at Victoria Hospital a total of 592 illegal abortions, this is what he spat at the soon-to-be-discarded Gender Affairs minister, Sarah Flood-Beaubrun: “Now let us forget that we do not have the figures yet for 1997 onwards. Am I then, on the very logic that she has presented, and as the church has presented, to say that she committed murder vicariously because she was the Minister for Health who allowed it to happen? Am I to say that? I refuse to say that!” Here he paused, as if to savor the sweets of his Mark Anthony impersonation.
“I refuse to say that,” he repeated, smiling the smile of a satisfied fox, if only foxes could smile. “The evidence is clear that it happened at Victoria Hospital. It is very clear where it happened. Go further and I will tell you about Saint Judes [Hospital].”
What clear evidence? What exactly is “vicarious murder?” Victoria Hospital record keepers were quick to let it be known that their use of the word “abortion” referred to natural miscarriages, not, as the prime minister sought conveniently to convey, the illegal termination of the life of an unborn child.
Let me end by reminding readers that following much hot air about the constitutionality of the law that would’ve denied bail to citizens accused of certain crimes, attorney Marcus Foster drilled holes in the government’s legal arguments, wide enough to accommodate speeding freight trains. Irony of ironies, Foster had entered the picture in defense of a fellow lawyer and politician accused of rape, and whom his opposites in the over-lawyered government were determined to keep behind bars until his trial, a torture that lesser accused mortals must endure for four or five years before they appear before a judge and jury!
(Publisher’s Note: The above was previously published in 2011 with a different heading.)
