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Language is one of the best determinants of any existing ‘culture’. Anything that has a local name or description in a local language, is part of the culture of the people, even if it is a minority culture or an abominable culture or an illegal culture.
Check your language or several other languages in Ghana, if you won’t find the local words/lexicon for gays and lesbians and transgender people. And, for those who are not in denial, reports of the existence of the practice of homosexuality in many secondary schools in Ghana have been around for decades! I mean, DECADES! These are not recent imposition by Whites or Westerners, as some people seem to suggest.
Yes, as a country we have every right at any stage to decide what we want, and no foreigners can dictate to us how we should live our lives. That said, this whole anti-LGBT bill is motivated by religion, Christian and Islamic, and to me our culture is only being added as a ruse or facade.
This is about religious ‘fundamentalists’ fighting for what they believe in. Ironically, those are religions and beliefs that were also imported from these same Westerners (and Arabs) who are now blamed for LGBT in Ghana.
I am a straight person, and I know my two children are as well. But let Ghanaians ask the sponsors of this bill: if they know their children or any close family members to be practicing homosexuality of whatever kind, after the bill is passed into law, would they report their children or family members for them to be jailed? Or if their children or family members were arrested, would they, as is often the case in Ghana, use their privileged positions to get their children out of the grips of their own law through ‘protocol’?
By the way, would one be wrong to suggest that it is a failure on the part of Christians and Muslims that sin and unrighteousness, including LGBT (as contained in their scriptures), are increasing because your prayers and lifestyles have yielded nothing to change society and your last resort is to use the law to put such people in jail?
And why would God/Allah listen to your prayers, when the houses of God/Allah have been turned into money-spinning ventures and religious leaders are more prayerful (and powerful) in front of TV cameras and radio microphones than in their bedrooms?
For a country that prides itself to have over 90% of citizens being Christians or Muslims, can you explain why corruption costs this country some $3 billion a year? Can you explain who are the people that the Auditor General each year reports are stealing from Ghana through procurement fraud and other breaches of the law?
The sponsors of this anti-LGBT bill seem to be constituting themselves into some kind of Iran-style morality police or the Taliban, with the way they acted recently about an LGBT billboard. And reading the bill together with their actions and public utterances, I’m afraid we are being set up for a Taliban-like theocratic State within our democratic State.
My last question for the ‘morality police’ sponsoring this bill: can you honestly disclose to Ghanaians the source of campaign finance for your elections to Parliament, the source of finance for your NGOs or churches (both for your general activities and for this bill in particular)?
Corruption and stealing that take money from the poor are as sinful as homosexuality, according to the scriptures of both Christianity and Islam. So let the sponsors come clean and show Ghanaians who is funding them, and tell Ghanaians they’re not part of any of the transactions that cost Ghana to lose some $3 billion a year.
Finally, as I noted earlier, I know my two children are straight. But if any of them were to come out as gay/lesbian and this bill were then a law, I WOULD NOT OBEY THAT LAW with respect to my children! I would never submit myself or my children to religious tyranny masquerading as a law with sponsorship/funding from undisclosed sources. Never. And if I perish, I perish!