IRO’s downward spiral

The accession of Gray-Burke is all the more remarkable given the fact that religious organisations have deliberately kept things male-dominated. In some Christian religions, for example, women cannot be clergy. At times, the IRO has itself appeared too closely aligned to a patriarchal world view.

The former President Brother Harrypersad Maharaj threw the organisation into disarray by unilaterally backing archaic child marriage practices that — while theoretically applicable to boys — effectively denigrated girls, rendering them chattels to be married off in the Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Orisha faiths. Tremendous damage was done when it was revealed that Maharaj’s views were not representative of the IRO as a whole, triggering a very public spat between spiritual leaders of various faiths.

While Gray-Burke’s appointment goes some way to atoning for its sins against women, recent statements she has made in the press suggest it is a case of one step forward and two steps backwards.

It is unfortunate that Gary-Burke has, like her predecessor, given a unilateral view on the question of gay marriage.

“Sooner or later we will give consent to gay marriages,” Gray-Burke said in a report published over the weekend in Sunday Newsday. She added she is not in support of it and, as a Justice of the Peace, she will not do any registration for gay marriages.

“Put me in jail,” she declared, inviting comparisons between her stance and that of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, the American woman who refused her legal duty to issue marriage licenses to a gay couple and thereby ended up in jail in 2015. Gray-Burke said we are a country of copycats and want to follow America.

This falls ill from the mouth of a woman who in one breath cites the achievements of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as mirroring her own as a woman who has shattered the glass ceiling and in the next breath condemns US culture as overly influential locally.

Just as a woman has a right to equality no matter which country she resides in, so too do members of the LGBT community have a right to equality no matter where they live. Were the Archbishop to look without prejudice, she would see that the thousands of women, men and their families who are calling for equality live right here.

Many sit on the pews of her own church.

No one has as yet opened a debate about gay marriage. While that matter is certainly relevant, the current call of advocacy groups is more basic. They are seeking a simple removal of the legally-entrenched discrimination wrought by the so-called Equal Opportunities Act (passed under the UNC) which explicitly singles out gay people as being worthy of discrimination.

The ink has barely dried on her instrument of appointment, yet Gray-Burke has already committed the same cardinal error of her predecessor, expressing a unilateral position on a matter that is properly the remit of the organisation as a whole. Equally bad are her comments on politics which show up the fact that her political past in the UNC means she is not the ideal person to sit at the head of an organization that should be apolitical.

This unpromising start calls for prayers. It means the IRO will likely continue its downward spiral into irrelevance. Which is perhaps fitting since questions of rights, whether for women, children, or LGBT persons, should never extend beyond secular reasoning.