By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
He was on the frontlines fighting a nuclearized Apartheid South Africa, when the lily-livered likes of Archbishop Yinkah Sarfo were panting under the beds of their girlfriends and paramours in morbid fear of the pseudo-revolution of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, and so what business does the Anglican Archbishop of the Asante Region have condemning his moral and intellectual superior for righteously asserting that a homophobic God cannot be the all-inclusive Divinity that the Bible talks about (See "Ghanaian Bishop Slams Desmond Tutu Over Gay Comment" Adom News / Ghanaweb.com 7/30/13).
Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu also implied that he would rather have his soul conducted into Hell than enter into an anti-gay Heaven. Now, compare the preceding to the widely known adulterous affairs so riotously contracted by the Ghanaian Anglican bishopric, and clergy in general, and tell me who is more forward-looking? This morally reprehensible sub-culture, of course, is not confined to the Ghanaian Anglican Church; not by any stretch of the imagination. Though, I must quickly point out that I have a second-sister-in-law, or a first-cousin's sister-in-law, who tumultuously dated a Kumasi-based Anglican priest for a remarkable temporal span; and the significant element to bear in mind here is the fact that the priest involved was a "happily" married man.
We must also quickly underscore the fact that both homosexuality and adultery are expressly proscribed by the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament. Obviously, in seeking to envisage homosexuality as a natural phenomenon reflected in all species of creation, Archbishop Tutu has far and away demonstrated that he is a progressive and an enlightened prelate emeritus, whereas his Ghanaian counterparts continue to be cognitively and culturally stuck in their old conservative ways, even while hypocritically and selectively practising the equally proscribed culture of adultery which, in a real moral sense, is worse than homosexuality, a scientifically proven act of natural inclination.
It is also not true that "all the Bishops and Archbishops of the Anglican Church met in Mauritius recently and unanimously condemned [the pro-gay rights] comments of [Archbishop Tutu] and dissociated themselves from it." Actually, it was only bishops and archbishops from such doctrinally peripheral regions like Africa, South America and Asia - a largely converted former British colonial subjects - who met on the island nation of Mauritius to self-righteously celebrate their own abject hypocrisy.
Even the Catholic Pope Francis I, himself a South American from Argentina, who commands the loyalty of a congregation in excess of one billion people, not a moeity of which the Anglican Assembly can boast of, has emphatically observed that he has absolutely no moral right or authority to condemn the members of the LGBT community. Indeed, this is what Pope Francis has been widely quoted to have said: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who I am to judge him?"
My convicted contention here is that there are too many far more serious moral problems for the leaders of the Church, in general, to deal with, including abject poverty and political oppression, exploitation, tyranny and corruption than inordinately and morbidly focusing on the purely private matter of who goes to bed with whom at the close of the day.
Needless to say, the very foundation of the global Anglican Church is morbidly predicated on the adulterous and conjugally promiscuous lifestyle of a British monarch. This is what the Anglican bishopric ought to be talking about.
________________________________________________________________
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 30, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
###