GOVERNMENT Senator Natalie Campbell Rodrigues is calling for a legal framework to be established which includes and protects the LGBTQ community, and for the creation of anti-discrimination legislation.

Making her state of the nation presentation in the Upper House on Friday, she pointed to data produced by Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (JFLAG) on discrimination, ill-treatment, and stigma against members of the community. “This is not Government-sanctioned hardships that these groups of Jamaicans are facing. These hardships, however, can be helped with specific steps relating to changes with certain laws and the development of an anti-discrimination Act as well as a change in our mindset of how we treat our fellow human beings,” she said.

Campbell Rodrigues said the Government’s commitment to set up a national human rights institute was a step in the right direction to address the situation. “We need to not forget that it was not so long ago when people of black skin and African heritage were shunned and treated less solely on the basis of our skin colour. All Jamaicans matter,” she said, arguing that throughout history people have used religion to support their biases, including in the British Parliament in the 1800s, in the arguments against the abolition of slavery.

A recent RJRGleaner Group-commissioned Don Anderson poll found that 80 per cent of Jamaicans surveyed are against rolling back the country’s buggery laws, but JFLAG says its own survey showed that 50 per cent of those it sampled in 1,043 interviews had positive attitudes towards the community on issues such as education.

Executive Director Glenroy Murray told the Jamaica Observer recently that the organisation’s assessment of the attitude of the general public is that more than half of Jamaicans surveyed believe LGBTQ people should have equal access to essential services, such as education, but those polls also showed that 67 per cent of the respondents did not support amending the laws to decriminalise same-sex intimacy.

In the meantime, Campbell Rodrigues is also advocating for greater levels of protection from discrimination and undignified treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). She said the problems in clinics which do not allow PLWHA privacy can be fixed by urging personnel to not publicise patient’s reason for attendance, for example.”A simple thing such as getting security guards and nurses to not call out loudly what persons are at the clinic for, would go a long way. Medicines are needed for persons living with HIV/AIDS to keep healthy and many stop going [to clinics] so as to save themselves the shame and indignity they feel in the public health system,” she said.

She also urged the private sector to partner with the State to establish a safe house for PLWHA. “How do we give dignity to these group of persons? Who will bite the bullet and make dignity and doing right a priority over fear, and ‘boom-by-by-ism’?” she asked.

The senator said non-governmental organisations and the international community should work with the LGBTQ and PLWHA to educate the society on the interplay between national laws, policies, and issues of protection from discrimination, prevention, and how these communities should be supported.