It really makes absolutely no difference whether the Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament, Prof. Michael Aaron Oquaye, recognizes the legitimacy of homosexual culture or not (See “We’ll Not Decriminalize Homosexuality – Speaker” Starrfmonline.com / Modernghana.com 7/11/17). The fact of the matter is that the practice of homosexuality pre-exists the Judeo-Christian institutionalization of the Bible. It does not need any human authority to either validate or invalidate it. Homosexuality or LGBTQ culture exists in human nature and has been proven by leading geneticists and scientists to be natural.

I highlight the preceding fact of life because Speaker Oquaye is an ordained Baptist cleric, and so he can be expected to assume his chosen stance. But, of course, we must also underscore the fact that Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution stipulates a Separation of Church and State, which means that Speaker Oquaye, or any other politician, for that matter, has absolutely no right to push his Christocentric convictions on the rest of society. The practice of any form of human sexuality in the public square is also a criminal offense in the country, anyway, so it really doesn’t matter whether homosexuality is a criminal offense in the country or not.

I mean, I don’t see the arrest of two male or female Muslims who are seen in a cheek-to-cheek pecking or kissing in the public square, as it were, as a mark of their religious expression of love for one another in the country. And so one does not also expect to see two women or men holding hands in public, however briefly or protractedly, as a mark of affection for each other, getting arrested either. But even more significantly, it is an open-secret that the expression and/or practice of homosexuality runs riotously rampant in most of the Islam-dominated Arab world, especially among the menfolk and the highest echelons of society.

As of this writing, it had been reported by the globally respected human rights organization, Amnesty International (AI), that out of some 55 countries on the African continent, at least some 21 countries, including the Republic of South Africa, recognizes the practice of homosexuality. Now, that is a great step towards cultural enlightenment and civility. That also means that 40-percent of Africans recognize the cultural reality or practice of homosexuality. I am also making the assumption that very likely most of the countries that recognize the legitimate existence and practice of homosexuality on the African continent are in the Northern Hemisphere.

But the question of whether anybody equates homosexuality with “bestiality,” as Ghana’s Prof. Oquaye does, is decidedly beside the point, for there have been committed legion acts of human depravity in both Ghana and the rest of the African continent and beyond that may be deemed to be more “bestial” and self-destructive than the engagement in homosexual intercourse, which is strictly what Speaker Oquaye means when he talks about his great abhorrence of homosexuality.

Among such acts of inexcusable human depravity are the Rawlings-Tsikata-sanctioned ethnic cleansing of the Ghanaian judicial system, that resulted in the brutal assassination of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges on June 30, 1982 and the retired Ghana Army major.

Then, of course, we can quarrel about the wanton acts of genocide that occurred in the name of war in several African countries in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, in places like Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Uganda and most recently, the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo. In other words, of all the criminally bestial acts or behavioural traits to worry about, the gay and lesbian lifestyle ought to be the least bit of our worries. Indeed, as the renowned Ghanaian sexuality expert, Prof. Sai, had occasion to observe about a decade ago, human sexuality is too complex to box neatly into categories of pure heterosexuality and homosexuality. How about hetero-oral-sexuality, for instance?