January 28, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The national parliament of Angola has approved a new criminal penal code that omits penalties contained in the previous criminal code for “vices against nature,” that is, unnatural sexual acts including homosexual sodomy. It also prohibits discrimination based on “sexual orientation.”
The Parliament’s new code also omits criminal penalties for abortion in cases of rape, or cases of danger to the life of the mother or the unborn child, according to the Angolan news service Angola24horas.com.
The decision to permit the killing of unborn children, even in cases in which the child’s life is threatened or in cases of rape, appears to be a capitulation to the international abortion lobby, which has pushed to legalize abortion throughout Africa for decades, backed by the U.S. and other Western powers. It remains unclear how ending a child’s life via abortion could help him when his life is “threatened.”
The United States and other Western nations have sought to impose gender ideology on the continent for years, particularly during the administration of Barack Obama.
According to the homosexualist and pro-abortion organization Human Rights Watch, Angola has no record of prosecuting anyone under its anti-sodomy law. However, the act of omitting “vices against nature” in its new criminal code has symbolic value for the LGBT lobby, which has pressured African countries to give up their prohibition of sodomy.
Homosexualist organizations are characterizing the repeal as a victory against “colonialism,” given that the legal codes prohibiting unnatural sexual behavior often were inherited from European colonial powers that ruled Africa until the mid-20th century. Most African countries have laws prohibiting sexual perversion that date from that time.
However, the impulse to legalize sodomy in Africa generally has not come from Africans, who strongly disapprove of homosexual behavior, but rather from countries of mostly Western European origin, particularly the United States, which under the Obama administration sought to impose the LGBT agenda on poor and vulnerable nations.
Angola’s new pro-LGBT penal code comes in the wake of the first legal recognition given to an LGBT organization, which was given in 2018 to “Iris Angola” (“Rainbow Angola”).
Angola joins a number of other African countries that have eliminated their prohibitions against sodomy in recent years. Sodomy is currently not prohibited by law in the Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, and South Africa, and some smaller countries. It continues to be prohibited in the majority of the territory of the continent.