By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The approval by the United States' Supreme Court (SCOTUS) of same-sex or homosexual marriages, was not decided on the basis of Christian scripture. It was also not unanimous. And so facile attempts by Ghanaian Christian leaders to wage their anti-gay crusade ought not to rope in either President Barack H. Obama, who referred the matter to the SCOTUS for consideration, or the John Roberts-presided SCOTUS that deliberated on and approved the legality - actually constitutionality - of same-sex marriages (See "The Church Will Never Accept Homosexuality - Palmer-Buckle" TV3Network.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/19/15).

The United States' Supreme Court decided on gay marriages squarely based on the constitutional stipulation that all citizens, irrespective of race, creed and gender are equal before the law. We must also bear in mind that the United States staunchly upholds its tenets regarding the "Separation of Church and State." In other words, the decision is purely secular. To be certain, there is absolutely nothing uniquely "Un-African" about being gay or not being gay, because there are proportionately as many LGBTSs in Africa as there are here in the United States, Latin-America, the Caribbean, Asia, Australia and elsewhere. Gayness is a pre-historic and ante-Biblical act of human behavior, else it would not have been discussed and sanctioned in the Biblical Old Testament.

What is "Un-African" is for virile men like Archbishop Palmer-Buckle, and those fecund and pretty young women among us to curiously opt for the nunnery in Ghana and elsewhere on the African continent. I have personally had the privilege of teaching an African military-veteran nun from Zambia at Mercy College, right here in New York City. The Accra Metropolitan Archbishop and his clerical associates and minions ought to be explaining to Ghanaians why they decided to choose the existential path of sexual non-procreativity. No fooling of anybody here - we know for a fact that a remarkable percentage of Ghanaian Catholic priests are routine fornicators and conjugal homewreckers; some are also widely rumored to have fathered sons and daughters. Celibacy is decidedly an Italo-European culture; it is very rare in continental Africa. We shall, once again, take up this matter in due course.

Now, what remains to be dispassionately and/or objectively discussed is whether, indeed, homosexuality is innate or culturally acquired. And here matters get very tricky, because if you facilely decide to label non-heterosexual sexual orientation as a psychological disorder, as the Metropolitan Archbishop of Accra maintains that it is, then one also has to immediately and logically admit that it is a human behavioral distortion. And if it is a human behavioral disorder which, by the way, has been publicly attested by some of the most knowledgeable scientists of our time to equally occur in the rest of nature, then one also ought to agree with the all-too-logical reasoning that homosexuality is a natural occurrence.

My problem with the debate on homosexuality is largely attitudinal. In other words, it well appears that those who are vehemently opposed to the gay lifestyle and same-sex marriages find absolutely nothing wrong with such even more pernicious sexual "misbehavior" as adultery among heterosexual adults and couples. It is an open-secret that quite a remarkable percentage of the religious leaders - Christian and Non-Christian alike - who have been most vocal in the crusade against homosexuality are themselves the most conjugally inconstant or unfaithful. And it appears to these unconscionable moral hypocrites that as long as the expression of one's sexuality is heterosexual, all transgressions, in terms of conjugal fealty, are forgivable.

If, as these religious leaders would have their congregations believe, homosexuals are not admissible into the Biblical Heaven, then, of course, being homosexual must be equated with being an adulterer. This may well have informed the philosophical thinking of Jesus Christ, when he solemnly observed that "There is only person without sin or blemish." And that person, of course, is GOD. Archbishop Palmer-Buckle also cites Genesis Chapter 1 to shore up his claim of sex being procreative. Does this therefore mean that once a couple has passed the age of active sexual reproduction or procreativity, sex, or the conjugal expression of sexuality automatically becomes proscribed or an act of sinfulness.

What I am logically driving at here is that there is no room for the legitimate expression of human sexuality as an act of pleasure or entertainment, one which has mutual enjoyment at its core. Then also, how about the expression of sexuality between a couple who are incapable of procreativity, or who got married at an advanced age with coital procreativity well beyond reach, or simply not integral to their conjugal objective?

For me, though, what needs to seriously engage the attention of all Christians regards how a venerable institution that has been celebrating Trinitarian-Homosexuality, in the name of Divine-Godhead, and feeling perfectly comfortable with the same turn around, all of a sudden, to tell us that, after all, the very act of procreativity has always been heterosexual. Meaning...that like Elder Obi Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's classic novel Things Fall Apart (1958), we ought to have been prayerfully reciting "In the name of the Father, the Mother, and the Son and the Daughter" all along. What a delightful, albeit rather belated, epiphany!

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