LONDON, U.K., December 20, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Britain’s Conservative government is reportedly under pressure to veto Bermuda’s law nixing homosexual “marriage” just six months after the island’s Supreme Court declared it legal.
Both Bermuda’s legislative assembly and Senate have approved the Domestic Partnership Act, which replaces “marriage” between two persons of the same sex with “domestic partnership.”
In doing so, Bermuda has become the first country to reverse the legalization of homosexual “marriage.”
But the governor of the British territory, Bermuda’s de facto head of state and the representative of the British monarchy, must sign off on the bill before it becomes law.
And the LGBTQ lobby and allies are pushing governor John Rankin to withhold his consent on this legislation.
Winston Godwin, the homosexual Bermudian who, with Greg DeRoche, argued successfully in court in May that the island’s former ban of homosexual “marriage” violated the U.K. Human Rights Code, released a statement to that effect.
“In such a position we should always do what is right, not necessarily what’s easy,” Godwin said.
“This bill effectively states that you are a second-class citizen because of who you love, and creates increased division within an already very divided country and within a minority all at once.”
And the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday reported that Rankin has consulted British foreign secretary Boris Johnson on the matter, because he needs Johnson’s approval to veto the bill.
Johnson himself is under pressure from MPs to instruct Rankin to veto the bill, according to the Mail.
Labour MP Chris Bryant declared in Parliament Saturday that “Bermuda seems to want to have it both ways. It wants the protection of being a British overseas territory but it doesn’t want to uphold British values and principles,” it reported.
“A British citizen, regardless of what part of Britain they’re from, should have the same rights,” Bryant said.
England and Wales passed legislation recognizing homosexual “marriage” in 2013. Scotland followed suit in February 2014.
But if Johnson advises Rankin to veto the bill, the Conservative government will be pilloried for neo-colonialism, according to the Mail.
If he does not, the the LGBTQ lobby will target Bermuda’s lucrative and essential tourism industry.
Indeed, Democrat Howard Dean, one-time presidential candidate and former governor of Vermont, took to Twitter to urge a boycott of the island after Bermuda’s Senate backed the bill last Friday.
“Progressive Labor Party in Bermuda just eliminated gay marriage. Americans who really are progressives should find another vacation spot”
Rankin’s office has “declined to comment” on the Mail article, the Jamaica Observer reported Tuesday.
Instead, it referred to its last week statement that “in considering this matter, the Governor will continue to act in accordance with his responsibilities under the Constitution.”
And an official with Johnson’s office told the Mail that while the UK government “is disappointed with the implications of this bill, this is a matter for the Bermuda government acting within the terms of the Bermuda constitution and in accordance with international law.”
More than 60 percent of Bermuda voters rejected homosexual “marriage” and homosexual civil unions in a non-binding referendum in June 2016, but a little under a year later Supreme Court Judge Charles-Etta Simmons ruled in favour of homosexual “marriage.”
A former attorney general of Bermuda, Mark Pettingill, told the Jamaica Observer he’s already been asked by a homosexual couple about the possibility of launching a constitutional challenge to the Domestic Partnership Act, once it has been signed into law.
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