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Cayman Kissing Story Gets Significant Attention

Timothy Kincaid

May 7th, 2008

The Caymanian Compass is getting a great deal of attention from their reporting of the police response to Aaron Chandler kissing his partner.

Cayman Free Press Web Development Manager Bronwyn Robbins said statistics showed 662,991 hits Monday.

“However, our engineers note that this is a huge under–estimate of the amount of traffic due to server overload and eventual outage due to the inability to cope with so much traffic,” she said. “The engineer’s estimation of unrecorded traffic due to the server meltdown was well over 1 million hits, possibly two.”

Most of this traffic is driven by American bloggers that find the behavior of the authorities to be objectionable and offensive. Reports are placing the islands in a very negative light.

However, the tourism officials are in an difficult position. While potential visitors are wary of traveling to a tourism destination that may arrest them for kissing, Caymanians are supportive of this threatening response.

“The web traffic today is substantially greater than normal,” said Ms Robbins. “The [DoT apologises to gay kisser] story has received over 500 views already and it’s only 10.20am,” she said.

While the majority of letters to the editor were in support of the RCIP officer and against the DoT’s apology to Mr. Chandler, the blog and forums had more balanced debate.

This necessity of appealing to two vastly different audience may be what is driving the multiple and conflicting messages from the tourism board. On the one hand, those responsible for keeping money flowing in want to appear welcoming to potential guests, but they also have to appease those elements in their society who embrace hostility.

Which brings me to my question: While I know that Jamaica is a place I cannot visit, will I be protected in the Cayman Islands?

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Larry
May 8th, 2008 | LINK

If anything, you shouldn’t bother with the entire Caribbean — they’re all just as bad as Jamaica. This story I blogged a couple of years ago should make that clear:

http://www.phatpage.org/news/042106.html

Mombian » Blog Archive » Weekly Political Roundup
May 9th, 2008 | LINK

[...] Police after kissing his boyfriend on the dancefloor of a hotel. The incident apparently caused a meltdown of the Web servers for the Islands’ newspaper, as American bloggers linked to their coverage. The Cayman Island [...]

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