BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Nov 09 2016 – Sociologist Dr Veronica Evelyn is blaming gay lifestyles for retarding the island’s birth rate, which she said had reached a “point of no return”.
Evelyn was a panellist at Monday night’s town hall meeting at the Queen’s College auditorium that explored Contemporary Threats to the Family. It followed the Second Annual Barbados Religions Rally on Family and Faith at the Bay Street Esplanade on Sunday night.
Responding to a question from the floor, Evelyn said the island was already experiencing fallout from homosexual lifestyles, pointing out that “for years we’ve been below the population replacement rate”.
“For every child-bearing woman 15 to 49 [years old] we should have about 2.1 children. [However], for years we have been at 1.6 . . . [and] the last thing I heard we’ve actually climbed to 1.8. But that’s not good, because 1.9 is critical; that is like the point of no return,” the specialist in humanities and behavioural science said.
“Two men cannot have a child. They might be given the right to adopt, but they can’t reproduce, neither can two women. Only a man and a woman [can],” she emphasized.
Evelyn also charged that increased mental problems, as well as a rising rate of suicides – which she contended were much higher within the homosexual population – had resulted in the confinement or death of many people of productive age.
“Our countries are too small and too vulnerable to take that kind of pressure,” she warned.
The sociologist also took issue with book publishers, who she said were introducing sexuality into texts for very young children.
“We are sexualizing our children, and then act as if we are surprised when they want to have sex,” Evelyn said.
In this regard, she took particular issue with the University of the West Indies and the Caribbean Development Bank for spending thousands of dollars in producing a curriculum in gender socialization for early childhood education.
“When we talk early childhood education, we are talking three to five year olds,” she said, before asking: “What is a gender sensitive schooling? What is gender socialization? What are you teaching?”
She made reference to one of the books in the CDB-UWI series, which she said was “full of inappropriate activities”, including an exercise that ended by stating “difference is good”.
By this, she surmised, children were being “trained away from who they really are to live an imitation life.
“God forbid that those books should ever be taught in our schools,” she stressed. (Barbados TODAY)
