It appears as if members of the gay and lesbian community have decided to teach The Bahamas a lesson as a result of the anti-gay protest they encountered three years ago when a cruise ship chartered for what was billed as a "Gay Family Values Cruise" docked in Nassau harbour.

Openly-gay television personality Rosie O'Donnell has once again chartered a cruise ship, the Norwegian Dawn, for a gay cruise scheduled for this July.

This time around, however, Nassau is not included in its scheduled ports of call, although it does plan to make a stop in The Bahamas at Great Stirrup Cay, a private island owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines in the Berry Islands chain.

In an article published on Friday, The Nassau Guardian sought reaction from the Nassau business community to get feedback on what sort of economic impact the decision to not have the ship stop in Nassau will have on the local economy. Anthony Darville of Sunshine Cruises, a tour operation catering to stopover guests, estimated that he and other operators stood to make between $30,000 and $50,000.

As was to be expected, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Tourism sought to downplay the significance of the economic loss as a result of Norwegian Dawn not stopping in Nassau, stressing instead that the "fact remains that they are still coming to The Bahamas" and that the Ministry has been "encouraging persons to visit all Family Islands to have a diverse experience" of The Bahamas.

Be that as it may, a stop in the Berry Islands is not the same as a visit to Nassau. Norwegian Dawn is a 15-deck mega ship with room capacity for 2,240 passengers, and if the coming cruise is as successful as the one three years ago, all of those rooms will be filled.

Because of the protests downtown to the first cruise, many of the passengers did not come ashore, and those that did really did not do that much shopping, more likely than not because they were turned off by the harassment of the protesters. All of this was filmed for an HBO documentary that was what The Guardian referred to in its story as "a public relations

nightmare for The Bahamas."

Indeed, it is difficult to measure the impact of the bad publicity for The Bahamas generated by that documentary, given the fact The Bahamas continues to be one of the leading tourist destinations in this region.

Maintaining that status, however, is becoming more and more challenging for the Ministry of Tourism in the aftermath of the new United States policy for Americans returning from the Caribbean to have a U.S. passport.

The full impact of this new law, which went into effect in January, is not expected to be noticeable in The Bahamas for several months, but there is a general consensus that there will be a fall off in the number of visitors who come to our shores.

More likely than not, Bermudans will roll out the welcome carpet for the passengers of the Norwegian Dawn, and encourage them to spend as much as they can while visiting the island. When they leave, they will no doubt do so having enjoyed a brief but wonderful visit to that island and possibly entertain thoughts for returning on a "regular" visit where their sexual orientation will not be a matter of public knowledge.

Surely, this should serve as a wake-up call for those holier-than-thou, self-righteous Bahamians whose tunnel vision prevents them from seeing the broader picture with regard to an individual's right to determine his or her own sexual preference.