This is a follow-up to CIHA Co-Editor Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo’s post about the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values” Bill, currently proposed by eight members of the Parliament: you can find the original post here. Ebenezer Bosomprah, the CIHA Blog’s Luce Graduate Fellow from the University of Ghana, with the rest of the CIHA Blog team, support Professor Adomako Ampofo’s stance against the bill. In this post, we outline the previous work that the CIHA Blog has done on critically investigating questions of religion and sexuality.
By: Ebenezer Bosomprah, University of Ghana, and the CIHA Blog Team
Ghana appears to be on the path of finding new ways to criminalize LGBTQ+ persons, ironically following laws originally enacted by former British colonizers. We at the CIHA Blog join Co-Editor Akosua Adomako Ampofo in opposing this proposed new legislation. In January 2021, an LGBTQ+ Rights centre was opened in the capital city of Accra, and was met with attacks and calls from parts of the population to shut it down. The centre was eventually closed by the security services on claims of illegality. Public debate is now at a high level due to the proposed bill in parliament, dubbed “The Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill 2021.” The bill supposedly seeks to strengthen the Ghanaian family unit as the basic unit of society, maintaining the binary gender constructs of male and female as the fundamental basis for formation of family and society and purportedly working at the same time to eliminate inequalities between males and females in all areas of development. Some religious bodies actively support the bill. But stiff opposition has also arisen from other sections of the Ghanaian public both at home and abroad, including lawyers, academics, civil society and human rights organisations, activists, ordinary Ghanaians, and, as Professor Adomako Ampofo points out, a number of religious activists and leaders. These critics have pointed out constitutional flaws as well as major human rights violations in the proposed bill and have submitted memoranda to parliament calling for its withdrawal. Here is a debate on the bill between representatives from academia and the legislature.
The CIHA Blog has long supported full recognition for people of all sexual identities in our posts. These include several series on LGBTQ+ issues in different parts of Africa. In 2015, for example, we posted a four-part series on LGBTQ+ rights on the continent. (On Gay Rights, Same-Sex Marriage and Some Reflections; Sexual Minority Rights and Using Human Rights) In addition, we have been honored to highlight the work being done at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in support of LGBTQ+ dignity and rights, including the Annual (since 2016) Eudy Simelane Lecture Series, sponsored by the Ujamaa Centre, the Other Foundation, and the Pietermaritzburg Gay & Lesbian Foundation. This series honors a South African soccer player on the women’s national team, Banyana Banyana, who was stabbed to death in April 2008 because of her sexual orientation. (for example, Inaugural Lecture in 2016; Prophetic Christian Pastoral Care in 2017; Memory and Agency in 2020) And, in March 2017 after our 2016 conference in Pietermaritzburg, we posted a three-part series by Dr. B. Dlamini on the series of workshops he initiated between Siyakhana – Ecumenical Community of the Paraclete (serving psycho-social and spiritual needs of LGBTIQ people), and community members, especially local church leaders. This series, “sought to dialogue with and engage community on LGBTI and human rights, on theologies of human sexuality, and on Bible studies and theology,” and to make community members aware of violence against LGBTIQ people.
This series, along with Professor Adomako Ampofo’s intervention, problematizes the conservative Christian condemnation of non-heterosexual identities and persons through careful examinations of Biblical passages and Christian theological debates. Professor Adomako Ampofo asks where Jesus is in Ghana’s proposed bill; Dr. B. Dlamini contends that Jesus’s teachings lend no support to LGBTQ+ exclusions (“Not in My Name!”). And, lest anyone think that such violence is absent in the U.S., we posted a piece in November 2017 showing a South African artist/activist’s solidarity “with local [U.S.] LGBTQI people and express[ing] kinship in the face of bias and erasure”, especially because of “the current spike of murders of trans people in the United States” (Zanele Muholi Visual Activism).
As the debate in Ghana continues, an advocate of the LGBTQ+ community poses this question to Christians: who are you to condemn us? This question is in line with Professor Adomako Ampofo’s challenge to the attempt to legislate a particular kind of morality for Ghanaians. But as she also suggests, the debate is not merely about morality, but also about the abuse of and violence against LGBTQ+ people: the Chief Executive Officer of Ghana’s Mental Health Authority asserted that homosexuality is a hormonal disorder and can be corrected, the Choggu chief of Tamale Metropolis of Ghana fined 4 people suspected to be gay, and the Terchire Chief of Ghana’s Ahafo region warned; we’ll perform rites to banish residents who are LGBTQ+. We applaud, therefore, all those who have come out publicly against this bill and against all violence against LGBTQ+ persons, in Ghana, across Africa, and in the U.S.