Honour assurance to assent to anti-LGBTQI+ Bill - Catholic Bishops to President
The Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference (GCBC) has urged the President to honour his word to assent to the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill when it is passed by Parliament.
The law, it said, in its final form, must reflect both the moral convictions of the Ghanaian people and the constitutional commitment to human dignity and fundamental rights.
“We respectfully recall the President’s earlier public assurance that he would assent to the Bill should it be duly passed in accordance with constitutional procedures,” the Conference said in a statement signed by the President of the GCBC, Most Rev. Matthew Kwasi Gyamfi.
Integrity
It said the recent public remarks by President John Dramani Mahama and the Minister of Government Communications, Felix Kwakye Ofosu, had occasioned the reflection and response with respect for their offices and with a sincere desire to deepen, rather than diminish, the quality of national conversation.
The GCBC said it had taken notice of reports that the President, speaking at the World Affairs Council, described LGBTQ+ matters as “not the most important issue we face as a nation”.
The minister, it said, in subsequent commentary, suggested that such matters were “not a major priority for Ghanaians”, and further characterised the debate as a “waste of time”.
It said even if intended to prioritise urgent socio-economic concerns, such descriptions risked conveying that certain moral questions might be set aside as inconsequential.
“We have followed attentively the legislative process concerning the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill attentively.
We respectfully recall the President’s earlier public assurance that he would assent to the Bill should it be duly passed in accordance with constitutional procedures,” it said.
The GCBC said it recognised that aspects of the Bill had generated legitimate concern and that those concerns deserved careful legislative scrutiny and, where necessary, refinement.
“Yet no question that touches the structure of human identity, family life, and social continuity can be trivial.
Nations do not live by bread alone.
They are also sustained by the invisible architecture of values.
“We readily acknowledge the weight of Ghana’s present challenges. Inflationary pressures strain households.
Youth unemployment remains stubborn.
Gaps in health care and education demand urgent reform.
On these matters, the Church has spoken consistently and will continue to advocate policies that promote equity, opportunity, and human development.
“However, it is analytically unsound to frame a choice between economic progress and moral coherence.
The two are not rivals but companions.
Empirical social research across contexts shows that stable family structures correlate with improved educational outcomes, reduced crime rates, and greater economic mobility.
The family, in quiet ways, is a nation’s most efficient social welfare system,” it said.
To weaken the moral ecology of the family, it said, was to erode the very conditions that made sustainable development possible.
Majority
The GCBC said for a significant majority of Ghanaians, questions surrounding marriage, sexuality, and the family were not peripheral curiosities and that they were matters of deep moral, religious, and cultural significance.
It said the persistence of public engagement across churches, mosques, traditional councils, and civic forums could attest to that.
By “family values,” it said “we refer to the understanding of marriage as a lifelong union between one man and one woman, ordered towards mutual good and the procreation and formation of children.
This vision, shared across many religious and cultural traditions in Ghana, recognises the family as the first school of virtue and the seedbed of civic responsibility”.
When the family flourished, it said, society found coherence and that when it fractured, social costs multiplied, often silently, often generationally.
