LBGT community hosts human pride march

Scores of Guyanese on Saturday joined a march organized and executed to mark the end of the LGBT Pride Week in Guyana.
Despite threats from the Georgetown Ministers’ Fellowship on Friday, hundreds turned up to the Pride Festival and Parade organized by the Guyana LGBT community.
The march, according to the organiser, Managing Director of the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD), Joel Simpson, was really a protest and an opportunity for the LGBT community to continue its empowerment work.
The march was also held to show the LGBT community’s concern over Government’s non-fulfillment of its 2015 campaign promise, he said.
Speaking with Guyana Times at the rally was former Education and Human Services Minister, Priya Manickchand, a member of parliament for the PPP/C.
Manickchand said her party does not support discrimination against minority groups, and Guyanese are committed to tolerance and inclusionary democracy.
On Thursday last, the Religious Fellowship, at a press conference, said: “The Christian community, which makes up more than 60 per cent of the population, is concerned by efforts to pressure the Government to legalize buggery.”
The Fellowship demanded that Government make known where its support lies in regard to decriminalisation of homosexuality, and threatened to withhold votes for the APNU/AFC administration.
Pastor Desmond Rogers had asserted that with the LGBT community being only a mere 10% of Guyana’s population, their political support — which is also being used as leverage against Government — should not place pressure on the administration to “legalise buggery.”
According to him, his Fellowship will not support this move, as it is deemed “immoral.”
But the march was more about human rights and dignity. There were no calls for the legalisation of same sex marriages, but for the decriminalisation of same sex intimacy among consenting adults, and for an end to discrimination.