Christopher Edwards and Shelby Williams in pink sand Horseshoe Beach in Bermuda.

Dallas resident Christopher Edwards filed the lawsuit that led to same-sex marriage in Bermuda; he and his husband left the islands when that right was revoked

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com
Dallas resident Christopher Edwards is the Edie Windsor of Bermuda. Just as Windsor’s successful lawsuit challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act cleared the way for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision two years later that legalized same-sex marriage across the U.S., Edwards’ case led to a decision two years later that legalized same-sex marriage in Bermuda.
But unlike the Obergefell decision, which remains law in the U.S., the decision in Edwards’ case has now been overturned, and marriage equality has been repealed in Bermuda. It is proof, Edwards warned, that rights are very precious, and we should never be complacent about the rights we’ve earned.
Edwards was born and reared in Bermuda, a small group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean, about 650 miles off the coast of North Carolina, with a population of about 65,000 people. His family has lived on the islands for six generations on one side of his family and seven or eight on the other, he said.
Bermuda is officially a British Overseas Territory, whose governor is appointed by the queen of England. But the governor has no constitutional power.
MarriageThe premier is elected, and the parliament mimics the British system: The upper house is appointed and the lower house is elected.
Most residents of the islands speak with a British accent. Edwards’ speech is unaccented, he said, because he attended school in Canada. He described life in Bermuda, best known among tourists for its pink sand beaches, as very pleasant but conservative.
“Bermuda has always been a very conservative island,” Edwards said. “Guns are completely illegal.” And while he was growing up, so was being gay.
“I knew someone deported to the U.K for engaging in homosexual acts,” he said. “If he was Bermudian, he would have been put in jail.”
In the mid-1990s, a member of the Bermuda Parliament, whose son was gay, introduced legislation that changed the law. Until then, gay life in Bermuda wasn’t completely underground, but there were no officially gay bars, Edwards said, although there were two bars where the gay community met.
He remembers that every Friday night, someone from the Salvation Army would come into the bars with an empty box to collect money and would leave with it full of cash. Still, during the debate over legalizing homosexuality, members of the Salvation Army protested outside the Parliament with signs that read “God hates queers.”
“That Friday night, the Salvation Army came into the bars as usual with an empty box — and they went out with an empty box,” Edwards recalled.
Edwards said the fear was if the bill to legalize homosexuality passed, gays would be out in the streets kissing and wearing boas. But, he stressed, Bermuda is conservative, and after decriminalization passed, life went on. Nothing changed.
When Edwards was growing up in the 1970s, Bermuda’s main industry was tourism. In the 1990s, the financial industry began to take over and the islands became even more conservative. But tourism remained an important industry on the islands.
After college in Canada, Edwards returned home and went to work for the Bermuda Tourism Authority as a marketing manager. From 2000 to 2005, he transferred to Dallas to promote travel to the islands.
While in Dallas, he met Shelby Williams and they got engaged. In 2005, Edwards left his job at BTA and returned to Bermuda alone. He and Williams maintained a long distance relationship.
After he returned to Bermuda, Edwards’ sister got engaged to a non-Bermudian. Her fiance received a “spousal letter” that granted him all rights and access as a citizen of Bermuda, including the right to own property and work. After 10 years of marriage, he would be able to apply for citizenship.
Edwards and Williams discussed the possibility of Williams moving to Bermuda, but unlike his sister, Edwards couldn’t get his fiance a spousal letter. Shelby had to apply for a work permit.
Williams moved to Bermuda in 2009 on a two-year work permit, and the couple started a successful dog grooming business. After two years, Williams was given a one-year visa renewal and then a final, non-renewable three-year extension.
The couple had a choice — either leave the islands or change the law.
The U.K. legalized same-sex marriage in 2014, but that law wasn’t applicable to British territories.
Along with five other couples, all with foreign spouses, Edwards and Williams formed the Bermuda Bred Company, which sued Bermuda’s attorney general and minister of home affairs claiming “discrimination on the grounds of marital status or sexual orientation.”
In November 2015, six months after the Obergefell ruling in the U.S., the Bermuda Supreme Court ruled that people from abroad in relationships with Bermudians had the right to live in Bermuda and work.
Meanwhile, a referendum on same-sex marriage had been scheduled for 2016. After his ruling, the chief justice of Bermuda’s Supreme Court ruled that it could go ahead as planned. That referendum did take place, and Bermudians voted overwhelmingly against same-sex marriage.
But a May 2017 Supreme Court ruling legalized same-sex marriage anyway. Not only was marriage equality the new law in Bermuda, but Preserve Marriage, the islands’ dominant anti-equality organization, was declared no longer a charity, the equivalent of an American group losing its non-profit status.
In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Charity Commission declared Preserve Marriage’s purpose unlawful and since its purpose appeared to be singling out and victimizing a group, that purpose was ruled purely political.
But over the next six months, things changed. The opposition was elected to office. New legislation was drawn up called the Domestic Partnership Law. This legislation would outlaw same-sex marriage and replace it with civil unions while guaranteeing “equivalent” protections. And Preserve Marriage’s charity status was restored.
In December 2017, the law passed and was sent to the governor to sign. He sent it back to Bermuda’s Parliament.
Parliament passed it again and returned it to the governor to sign. Instead, the governor sent it to the British Foreign Office in England to deal with.
In February, the Foreign Office returned it to the governor who had to give the new law royal assent. The repeal and new domestic partnerships go into effect in June.
Meanwhile, Edwards and Williams had returned to the U.S. as the Bermuda Bred case wound its way through the courts.
Shelby’s visa was going to expire and there was no guarantee when a ruling would be handed down or where it would fall, so they had to decide what to do. They had already married in Massachusetts so Edwards when asked his husband what he wanted to do, Shelby said since they were married in the States, and since his parents were in their 80s, they should to return to Dallas.
Before leaving the islands, they shut down the Edwards family jewelry company that had been in business since 1929.
In Dallas, Edwards most recently was Jeffrey Payne’s campaign manager in his bid to become governor of Texas.
Edwards noted that the Bermuda Tourism Authority had just started a new campaign to snare some of the lucrative LGBT travel market. Cunard registers its ships in Bermuda, a flag of convenience that allows it to skip some of the stricter regulations of the U.K. That registration, however, allowed Cunard to attract same-sex couples to cruise on its ships and marry at sea after marriage equality became law in Bermuda.
But since the revocation of marriage equality there, Cunard reports having lost marriage-related tourist business.
Ellen Degeneres responded to Bermuda’s repeal of its marriage laws by canceling her own trip to the islands and encouraging others to do the same. But some LGBT Bermudians are against any boycott, concerned that any economic repercussions would be blamed on them, making them a target for local reprisals.
Edwards urges LGBT people in the U.S. to learn a lesson from the Bermuda experience: As hard as we’ve fought for civil rights in the U.S. and as far as we’ve come, those rights can also be suddenly taken away. We have to be vigilant, he warned.