Barbados elected its first female prime minister on Thursday as the opposition Barbados Labour Party (BLP) took all the seats in parliament. The BLP’s platform calls for a referendum on LGBT issues. The new prime minister, Mia Mottley, won after overcoming a homophobic campaign by the ruling Democratic Labour Party, which criticized her presumed sexuality. Mottley previously served as the country’s Attorney General, starting in 2001. In that position, she commissioned a study on laws that affected HIV interventions. The study recommended scrapping the country’s anti-sodomy law. Though largely unenforced, it is the worst in the Western Hemisphere, calling for life imprisonment. At the time, the proposal to repeal the anti-sodomy law ran into strong public opposition and was dropped.