by Hilary White
ABUJA, April 11, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The European Parliament’s Intergroup on gay and lesbian rights is condemning the Nigerian government for its proposal to make homosexual “marriage” illegal and to ban homosexual advocacy organizations. MEP Michael Cashman (UK), president of the Intergroup, said that Nigeria’s government supports a culture that is “homophobic,” and “continues to threaten the lives of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) citizens.”
The legislation imposes five-year prison sentences without the option of a fine for anyone attempting to create homosexual “marriages” or for persons who witness, aid or abet the ceremony of same-sex “marriage.”
The bill prohibits “any person involved in the registration of gay clubs, societies and organisations, sustenance, procession or meetings, publicity and public show of same sex amorous relationship directly or indirectly in public and in private.” The bill has reportedly been approved in the Federal Executive Council but has not yet been submitted to the National Assembly.
Despite objections from Europeans and American observers, the law is only an addition to existing prohibitions against homosexual activity in Nigeria which outlaws consensual homosexual conduct between adults with fourteen years imprisonment.
Justice Minister Bayo Ojo called homosexual unions ‘unnatural and un-African’.
The website of the government’s Office of Public Communications reported that President Obasanjo was concerned that the corrupting influence of gay rights campaigners in nearby South Africa might reach Nigeria.
The law enjoys wide support among Nigeria’s Christians as well. Describing the homosexual temptation in moral terms as “sexual inversion,” Igbiki Benibo writing in The Tide, a Christian online source, calls homosexual acts, “bestial and universally unethical.”
The Standing Committee of the Anglican Church of Nigeria commended the proposal. Nigerian Primate, Archbishop Peter Akinola said in a statement that the bill ought to be passed since “the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality.”
Akinola’s support for the bill has been criticized by his Episcopal colleagues in the US. US Bishop Robert Duncan, responded that Akinola and other Christian Africans have been working for years, with little support from the west, to resist the imposition of Shariah law in all of Nigeria and in the rest of Africa.
“It should be noted that while the proposed law sounds harsh to American ears, the penalty for homosexual activities in those parts of Africa under Islamic Shariah law is death,” Bishop Duncan wrote.
Bishop Duncan criticized westerners “who claim to champion the primacy of local understanding and culture demanding that foreign sister churches give up their local understanding and culture and be judged by an American understanding of individual rights.”
“There is a word for the one-way imposition of values—colonialism,” Bishop Duncan concluded.