• A Methodist priest says citizens must avoid divine wrath by supporting an anti-LGBTQ+ bill
• Parliament is due to debate the bill which has divided public opinion
Members of the Christian clergy continue to speak up and out loudly against a group advocating for the rights of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgender, Queer and Intersex, LGBTQI+, community.
The two major blocs of the Christian faith, the Christian Council and the Charismatic and Pentecostal Council of Ghana, have this week been active in calling for an anti-LGBTQ+ Bill to be passed into law.
Reasons of religion and morality have been advanced as the basis for their stance, as against the human rights and secular constitutional dispensation advanced by a pro-LGBTQ+ group made up of academicians and rights defenders.
But for a Methodist priest in the person of Rev. John G. Bortey, the LGBTQI+ orientation is an abomination to God.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, he asked the faithful to cast their minds back to an incident in the Bible where God destroyed a people because of same-sex relationships.
“The Lord abhors it, it is barbaric and against our cultural beliefs. As a nation, we should not forget what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. Let us do away with it before God turns his anger on us,” he warned.
Sodom and Gomorrah is the story of how the people of the Prophet Lot (Luut in Islam) were destroyed by God when people in the town resorted to same-sex relations.
For his part, the Superintendent Minister of the Methodist Church Ghana, Aldersgate Society in Ashaiman, the Very Reverend Kwadwo Obeng Maxwell, also stressed the need to resist the LGBTQ+ movement.
He said: “It is about morality and not rights. We talk about human rights where human beings act like humans. They should have said rights and not human rights; we know through creation that God created the human anus for disposal purposes so how can a person in his right sense have sexual intercourse through the waste disposal channel?
"Morally, we came to learn that when somebody does something that is not good, the white man would say it is inhuman, which means human beings have standards, so LGBTQ+ is inhuman,” Rev. Obeng Maxwell asserted.
Ghana’s pro-gay collective
A group of 18 academicians and human rights defenders have voiced strong opposition to the bill before Parliament, which is seeking to extensively criminalize the activities of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, LGBTQ+.
The group submitted a memorandum to Parliament seeking that the bill be rejected because it was largely unconstitutional and infringed on basic human rights.
Members of Parliament behind the bill, led by Ningo Prampram MP Sam Nartey George, have rubbished the memorandum and asserted that the bill will be passed into law because it has the support of the wider Ghanaian populace.
Methodist Priest, Rev. John G. Bortey