Ghanaians have gotten their panties in a bunch because President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, speaking to Al Jazeera, failed to validate their worst homophobic impulses by actually giving a reasoned answer to the question of gay rights.
Akufo-Addo did not endorse homos*xuality, as some are pretending he did, but he did not personally denounce it either. He simply said Ghanaians are against it and that one day if enough pressure arose, it might become legalized.
For those pissed off, that’s how a democracy works.
Leaving aside the President’s comments for a moment, Ghanaians have never been able to give out a reasoned argument over why homos*xuality should be illegal. Some call it ‘unnatural’, but that’s a stretch when it’s a phenomenon that has been observed in animals. Others say it would destroy the human race because no one would procreate anymore, but its not like the earth is currently nearly filled to capacity, not to talk of the uncountable number of orphaned children worldwide without parents. Also infertile couples have never been told they can’t marry, and they can’t procreate either!
It always comes down to these two issues – it is against our religion and it is against our culture. Our culture used to be to kill people whenever a king dies and to cut off the clitoris of girls, so it’s not like culture is a static thing simply staying where it always is. It also used to be our ‘culture’ that you couldn’t marry from certain tribes if you came from another certain tribe.
So honestly the opposition comes down to the number one driver of motivations for most Africans, religion. Both Christianity and Islam expressly forbids being gay and interestingly, both proscribe the death penalty for it, so intolerant were the writers.
Most Christians in Ghana are so against the entire thing because of their religion, and they would quote you chapter and verse as to homos*xuality should remain illegal. What they often fail to mention though is that most sins in the bible are not illegal, so why should homos*xuality exclusively be illegal?
As Christopher Hitchens used to famously say, only three of the ‘Holy Grail’ of Christian laws, the ten commandments, are actual laws – thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not bear false witness (perjury). If Christians were really honest, they would push to make every single sin listed in the bible a criminal offence, so we know the bible is really the driver of our laws.
If being gay should be criminal because it is a ‘sin’, then so too should committing adultery/fornication. So too should getting a divorce or disobeying your parents. So too should cussing out loud in public.
There isn’t a bible verse saying that some sins are more grievous than others, but what Christianity teaches is essentially that ‘all sin be sin’. If ‘all sin be sin’ ampa, then they all should get you jailed or none of them should get you jailed.
So if you are arguing that homos*xuals should be jailed because the bible says being gay is a sin, you should go all out and argue for the criminalization of every other sin in the bible, or prove yourself the hypocrite I definitely know you to be.
As I pointed out on social media – let’s criminalize all sins if we really want to live by the laws of the bible as a theocratic state.
Since the bible says homosexuality is a sin and Ghanains argue it should remain criminal based on that, I eagerly await the setting up of a commission to explore the criminalization of the following sins and to suggest appropriate jail terms (including death).
Adultery
Fornication
Lying
Disobedience
Eating shellfish
Divorce
Working on the Sabbath
Worshipping graven images
Wearing a cloth made of two fabrics
Calling someone a fool…
You can read your bible, add the sins and let’s criminalize them all. Let’s really live by the law of the bible.
Over to you, my noble countrymen.