Last week, the Leader of Government Business, Hon Kurt Tibbetts, announced the timetable for the constitutional negotiations with Britain and the composition of the Cayman delegation that will participate in these negotiations.

The government and the opposition political parties will each have up to four Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) as part of the delegation, thus presumably representing the entire voting population of the Cayman Islands.

The Chamber of Commerce will have one representative, presumably representing the business community; in other words, the economic engine of the country.

Next on the list is a representative of the Cayman Ministers Association CMA (CMA), and this inclusion is hardly surprising, although of arguable justification.

The activities of the CMA in a constitutional context have been a matter of some debate in the editorial and opinion columns of Cayman Net News and the very valid point has been made that, as individuals, the members of the CMA have every right to voice their opinions on the constitutional proposals. Indeed, we would defendthis right of freedom of expression to our last breath.

However, the difficulty for us arises when attempts are made to impose the religious beliefs of one particular segment of our society on everybody by means of constitutional “Caymanising” that would modify the well-establishedconcepts of “universal” rights.It’s bad enough when one of the current MLAs reportedly bases their long-term planning policies on the Second Coming of Christ, which in and of itself reinforces the importance of the separation of church and state.

However, the inclusion in the constitutional delegation that, frankly, astonishes us is a representative of the “C.I. Mission of Seventh Day Adventists.”

We do not at this time know thetotal membership of the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) church in the Cayman Islands but we understand that it is the largest religious group outside of the CMA.

Worldwide, however, according to Christian Century, membership in the SDA church was put at some 15.4 million as of June 2007. This compares to a reported total membership of Catholic and Protestant churches worldwide of some two billion people, according to Wikipedia.

Therefore, although the Seventh Day Adventists are regarded as a Protestant Christian denomination, they represent a minute percentage of Christians worldwide.

Furthermore, the reason why the SDA is not represented in the CMA is that the doctrinal differences between the Seventh Day Adventists and what might be called mainstream Protestants are reportedly too great to great to permit such membership.

There is insufficient space to go into such doctrinal differences in detail but many people will know that the SDA church observes a Saturday Sabbath and Old Testament dietary rules.

However, they also believe in the concept of “Investigative Judgment” (fundamental belief 24) - a judgment of professed Christians that supposedly began in 1844, the significance of that date being a throwback to an original belief (Adventism) that Jesus Christ would return to Earth on October 22, 1844. When this failed to occur, the then adherents went back home and (wisely) refrained from setting dates for the Second Coming. Nevertheless, this underlying notion developed into the doctrine of the investigative judgment referred to.

The one characteristic of the SDA church that to our mind sets them apart from the CMA in a positive way is their enthusiasm for freedom of religion, although this is to some extent self-serving given their focus on promoting legislation that allows their adherents to refrain from working on Saturdays.

We therefore regard this unwise inclusion of yet another religious grouping – an extreme minority one at that – in the constitutional delegation as an affront to the Cayman people. Not that we have any particular axe to grind with the SDA church as such, we nevertheless have to view their surprising inclusion in this process in the context of who has been left out of the process.

For example, there are no advocates for the rights of women and children an area where Cayman has been less than ready to adopt international treaties in this respect. Who is going to represent the specific concerns of this group that together represent a large majority of the population?

Who is going to represent the interests and rights of residents who are not Caymanians? Again, this is a large and significant part of our population and one that has an equal interest in a constitution that they must live under for however long they are here.

So, what’s really going on here? Is this a vote-gathering exercise in anticipation of a highly competitive election in 2009 or are there religious beliefs at work within the Cabinet that must be inappropriately appeased?