About 10 years ago, a movement or association calling itself the Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Queer Intersex Rights or LGBT, as is popularly known, surfaced in Ghana, openly threatening to force itself on us as an organisation that should be protected and allowed to operate its doctrines outside the existing and known laws of the country.
Today, AD 2021, that same organisation, having existed underground because it fears its own shadows has, this time, sought to impose itself on the nation unawares.
This, its leaders did by going on social media and publicizing an event that showed they were opening their offices in the country to trade indecency.
Earlier, they had systematically but surreptitiously popped up on media interactive programmes, vehemently pushing their agenda. Since then, they had, on and off, been aggressively looking for that space to bounce back.
In some democratic platforms in Europe, these advocates have unfortunately tried to paint Ghana as a nation persecuting LGBTs in the same manner Boko Haram terrorises innocent citizens or Christians, for that matter, in Nigeria, Mali and Niger.
In series of photographs accompanying the announcement on social media, we have pictures of Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians looking busy and adorning the new office environment in a fit of excitement.
To the fact that they have an agenda to use human rights as a weapon is established, they have refused linking their claims and rights to our laws as exist in our books, or our cultures in communities around the country.
Culture and practices
The truth is that, while in Ghana these things are usually private and personal and so we hardly hear cases about those involved openly parading it in public, evidence that anybody is being hounded or persecuted for being gay or lesbian is almost non-existent.
Culture and tradition is interestingly a part of the laws of Ghana as it does in several other nations, including Europe.
As long as a culture and its practices are connected to peaceful co-existence, harmony, unity and development, we and, indeed, most black African states and, especially, countries that practice the Common Law system embrace it as part of our laws as stated in Article 11 of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution.
That is aside of the fact that we have a whole gamut of human rights laws which are in sync with international conventions, including those affecting women and disabled persons, the aged and the vulnerable.
We can’t afford it
In a nation where we face armed robbery and unemployment challenges, as well as hurdles in funding health and education, our priorities may be different from that of endowed Europe where they can afford to feed teeming millions in their prison facilities, if they consistently break the laws.
Immorality in schools and in communities is another worry we have had to live with, at a time when we want our kids in the classroom to be part of the dream to develop Ghana and share the fruits thereof.
That is why we commend all those protesting against the threat to open desecration of our already morally weak communities on the part of the LGBT advocates here in Ghana.
We commend the Catholic Bishops Conference and the other mainline churches, the traditional authorities and the ordinary citizens who want to see a more decent society in which we can go in and come out safely, aware that we are each other’s keeper – and not destroyer.
We congratulate the government for ensuring the immediate closure of the said LGBT office in Ghana.
But that is also why we commend an outspoken Ghanaian lawyer, Moses Foh-Amoaning, Executive Secretary for the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values.
We agree with him that the LGBT doctrine cannot be a human right and that Ghana has the sovereign right not to legalise its operations.
Protecting our kids
While this conversation rages, it is the belief of the Daily Statesman that parents take control and protect their kids from the influence of the LBGT opium.
It is imperative that we recognise the duty God and country have placed on us to avoid that temptation to invite into our society and homes a way of life that we would live to regret for the rest of our life.
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