By Severious Kale-Dery
THE Alliance for Christian Advocacy Africa (ACAA) has urged Parliament to resist any attempt to lure them into amending the laws of the country to recognise the rights of lesbian, gays, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) persons in the country.
It called on all Ghanaians to join in the crusade to fight any attempt to get LGBTQ+ legitimised in the country, saying it should not be made the responsibility of just the government to fight it.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra last Monday, the President of the alliance, Reverend Dr Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong, encouraged the legislature to, as a matter of urgency, strengthen the laws that prohibit such practice, stressing that it was against the moral and cultural values of the country.
“We need our Members of Parliament (MPs) to strengthen our laws such that we cannot accommodate this kind of marriage. We also need the citizens, we need the community leaders, we need the church leaders and leaders at all levels to resist this move,” he said.
Culturally wrong
Rev. Dr Opuni-Frimpong, a former General Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana, therefore, said the ACAA was mobilising social force to resist the pressure to allow the infiltration of LGBT+ into Ghana and commended all the various groups that had already raised their voices against such a move.
“We as Ghanaians should let the Western World know that something can be legally right but culturally wrong, and so even if elsewhere LGBT+ is a human rights issue and is legally right, in our context, it is culturally wrong,” he said.
He also called on Ghanaians to help protect the sanctity of marriage and family life values.
“In the midst of the LGBTQ+ saga, church leaders, traditional leaders, Muslim leaders and all other leaders that form the fibre of our society must pay attention to the sanctity of family life values,” he added.
Conditional support
The ordained Presbyterian minister and academician acknowledged that there were influential bodies and institutions and rich individuals that were behind the infiltration of the LGBTQ+ in various societies. He said it was common knowledge that third world countries against the LGBTQ+ were being threatened with restriction of support from the donor community, and stressed the need for Ghana to resist this, saying the values and future of the country could not be traded.
Marriage
Rev. Dr Opuni-Frimpong said it was good, therefore, to protest the group from opening offices but that the important thing in the opinion of the ACAA was “how we will let Ghanaians give respect and attention to what marriage means to us”. “For us, marriage is not just sexual pleasure between two men or two women, but marriage has more when it comes to the issue of child upbringing, when it comes to community building and we should educate our people, our young people in the church, in the traditional community, in the mosques and in our schools to resist any such pressures,” he said.
He said such education would help the youth to resist any effort to lure them into the same sex union, stressing that the time had come for leaders of all levels to unite against LGBTQ+ “and let the world know that our society is built on a healthy family and, therefore, we should protect the sanctity of marriage”.
He urged the media, in particular, to champion the crusade by promoting the sanctity of marriage and family life values, and urged Ghanaians to join the crusade and not to leave it to only the leaders.