Parliament has spoken, the gay question is settled

I was elated when I saw on television on Tuesday, May 22, 2018, members of Parliament unanimously and in the strongest terms, expressing their disgust over calls for the legalisation of homosexuality. Congratulations on saying no to gayism. You have lived up to your honorific designation. I salute you.

To Ghanaians, particularly intellectuals who are not sure which side to support and are tight-lipped, I want to assure them that there is absolutely no scientific basis that homosexuality is normal. Yes, there are biological bases for some people to have homosexual tendency, but that does not constitute a scientific basis for a normal behaviour. There is a biological basis for tramadol addiction, albinism, haemophilia, sickle cell disease and many other conditions and disorders in life. That does not make those conditions normal. All it means is that we now understand the biological basis of the ‘abnormality’ and that we must take steps to find treatment for them. Why not a similar attitude towards homosexuality? Homosexuality rightly seen, is an abnormal lifestyle.

Homosexuality has been known all along, our own “Kwadwo Besias” included. But it had been considered abnormal and a mental disorder until the 1960s when gay pressure forced the scientific community to ‘rethink’ their position. Without any scientific basis, just political pressure and opinion poll of American psychiatrists, the community decided to call it a normal variation of sexual orientation.

Homosexuality used to be a disorder in the same category as sexual preference for children (paedophilia), dead people (necrophilia), animals (zoophilia or bestiality), smelling of faeces (coprophilia), smelling of flatus (ectoproctophilia), smelling of ladies’ panties (fetishism), Peeping Tom (voyeurism), rubbing of genitals against a female’s buttocks (froteurism) and inflicting pain or suffering for sexual gratification (masochist-sadism). Weird, right? Now political pressure of the gay world says, ‘Let ours be considered normal but the others to remain abnormal.’

The response by Uhuru Kenyatta in this matter is excellent: “Kenya (and for that matter Ghana and all Africa) has so much on its plate - education, poverty, women empowerment, child rights, etc and when we finish solving them, then we will probably turn to the gay question which, for the moment, is not a priority”.

Truth is, why is the West pushing it so much? If we were to ask them to list our top five priorities to address, can they in all sincerity include gay issues? If it is the human rights per se, why are they not supporting us to ban trokosi, witches camps, chaining of patients, child labour, etc? Why are they bent on homosexuality? And the beautiful question: Why are they not legalising polygamy? So they have their cultural values and we have ours. Why do they think they have the moral right to determine our priorities for us?

Prof. Lambo of Nigeria, an eminent psychiatrist and a Deputy Director-General of the World Health Organisation in his time, noted in 1956 the vexation he described as the ‘moral arrogance of 19th and 20th century Europe, which sets up its civilisation as the standard by which all the other civilisations are to be measured.’ Obviously that arrogance has not disappeared.

In June 2016, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, declared that: ‘Same sex marriage is not a human right.’ Why is the developed world silent on that? Not more than four per cent of any society is homosexual. Yet, they want the remaining 96 per cent to kowtow to their practice. And we are not saying they cannot do it in their rooms, but to come out openly and say it should be legalised is unacceptable.

But our leaders must be decisive. The parliamentarians have spoken, the Speaker has spoken and the Presidency has spoken. But it would be good if the President himself would be emphatic. His response to Christiana Amanpour on CNN that homosexuality is ‘bound to happen’ did not help matters. Truth is, any government that encourages homosexuality in Ghana will be committing political suicide. That is the mood of Ghanaians today. There is a certain mathematical formula in politics that many politicians seem oblivious of. At school, five over 10 was a pass. In politics, nine over 10 can be a failure. You can provide everything else (9/10) to the electorate and if you get the one important thing wrong, all your nine over 10 comes to nothing and you fail. Is somebody hearing?

Paul Adom Okyere once asked me on his Good Evening Metro TV programme: ‘What if in 40 years Ghana decides to accept gay life, would that not mean we were primitive in 2018 to have resisted it?’ My response today: ‘Ghana would rather have sunk deeper into moral decadence if we accept it.’ If we wash our hands after toilet, what is the wisdom in entering the shithole full of faeces? Homosexuality is not bound to happen. It can and should be resisted.

The writer is the CEO of the Mental Health Authority.