ACCRA, Ghana (LifeSiteNews) — Ghana lawmakers yesterday passed a bill criminalizing homosexual behavior, as well as the promotion, advocacy of, and funding of such behavior.
“After three long years, we have finally passed the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Act 2024,” Sam George, one of the bill’s main sponsors, announced on X.
First introduced in June 2021, the proposed law seeks to uphold traditional sexual ethics in Ghana while rejecting the so-called “rights” of people to engage in or promote deviant behavior.
Included in the bill are proposed criminal penalties for those who engage in homosexual acts or promote such acts. This includes an outright ban on same-sex “marriage,” same-sex adoption, and other public displays of homosexual or transgender behavior. The bill also seeks to clamp down on transgender ideology by banning mutilating procedures for gender-confused individuals.
According to local media, homosexual behavior is punished by the bill with six months to three years in jail, while those who support or promote the activity may be sentenced to three to five years in prison.
MPs said the bill was drafted in response to the opening of Ghana’s first so-called LGBT “community center” in the country’s capital in January 2021, Intel Region reported. However, police shut down the center following public protests and pressure from Christian religious leaders.
The bill needs the approval of Ghana President Nana Akufo-Addo to take effect. In early 2018, he claimed that the legalization of homosexuality was inevitable. It remains uncertain whether he will approve the legislation.
The Catholic bishops of Ghana strongly support the law, while the far-left, pro-LGBT United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has attacked it and urged Ghana’s president not to sign it into law.
Africa’s continued resistance to the acceptance of sodomy has led pro-LGBT international bodies and countries including the United States government, the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank to attempt to force countries in the region to abandon their principles or face financial or economic consequences.
In October, U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration announced that Uganda would be axed from its “African Growth and Opportunity Act” program after approving its new anti-sodomy law. In August, the World Bank took similar action when it froze loans to Uganda over the latter’s unwillingness to embrace sodomy.
Following Scripture and the 2,000-year-long Tradition of the Church, the Catholic faith holds that homosexual acts are a “sin that cries to heaven” and “intrinsically disordered,” since they are “contrary to the natural law” and “close the sexual act to the gift of life.”
“They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved,” states the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Church proclaims that human sexuality, as created by God, is designed for the conjugal love exclusively between a man and woman and finds it sole legitimate expression within marriage.
Numerous studies have also demonstrated the harmful effects of homosexuality, which is associated with numerous life-threatening diseases, like HIV/AIDS and various cancers, and psychological issues that cannot be explained by one’s culture’s “acceptance” of LGBT ideology.
After one study was released that found that teenagers who self-identify as homosexual are five times more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to attempt suicide, Peter Sprigg of Family Research Council commented that the takeaway finding is not that teenagers suffering homosexual tendencies are allegedly marginally less likely to commit suicide in a “supportive” environment, but that, overall, such teenagers are so many times more likely to commit suicide than their non-homosexual peers – “a difference that far overwhelms any difference caused by the ‘social environment.’”
Dr. Neil Whitehead, a scientific research consultant from New Zealand and author of the book My Genes Made Me Do It – a scientific look at sexual orientation, pointed out in a paper available on the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) website that the authors of one study done in the Netherlands “were surprised to find so much mental illness in homosexual people in a country where tolerance of homosexuality is greater than in almost all other countries.”
Dr. Whitehead pointed out that, “In his cross-cultural comparison of mental health in the Netherlands, Denmark and the U.S., Ross (1988) could find no significant differences between countries – i.e. the greater social hostility in the United States did not result in a higher level of psychiatric problems.”