On The Matter Of Homosexuality In Ghana

HYPOCRISY DISGUISED AS PATRIOTISM

BY Samuel Adjei Sarfo

DOCTOR OF JURISPRUDENCE

The recent hullabaloo about gay rights in Ghana generated by the president’s nomination of a distinguished woman of law, Nana Oye Lithur, to a ministerial position casts Ghana in a rather bad light. Also in bad taste are the positions taken by the clergy and the National Union of Ghana Students against this capable woman’s appointment. This article does not focus on the merits or otherwise of homosexuality. Rather, it examines the wisdom in the mass hatred for gays and juxtaposes this phenomenon with the religious and intellectual predilection of the typical Ghanaian.

Sodomy laws existed in the State of Texas until the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, (2003). In this seminal case, the Houston police were dispatched to Lawrence’s apartment in response to a reported weapons disturbance. The officers found two males, Lawrence and Garner, engaged in a sexual act. Lawrence and Garner were charged and convicted under Texas law of “deviate sexual intercourse, namely anal sex, with a member of the same sex.” Lawrence and Garner challenged the statute as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court of Appeals considered defendants’ federal constitutional arguments under both the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. After hearing the case en banc, the court rejected the constitutional arguments of the defendants and affirmed their convictions. The court held that Bowers v. Hardwick was controlling regarding the due process issue. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) is a United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals. The Supreme Court granted certiorari. The issue before the Supreme Court at this point was whether a statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct violates the Due Process Clause? The Court held that yes, a statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct violates the Due Process Clause. The Supreme Court, speaking through Justice Kennedy, stated that liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The defendants were adults and their conduct was in private and consensual and therefore legitimate. Thus seventeen years after Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court of the United States directly overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas and held that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. In overruling Bowers, the Supreme Court stated that "Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today." To deal with the gay/lesbian issue without the taint and paint of passion requires a quantum of self-control and discipline which can only be developed after a long time of reflection and in-depth analyses. To the simplistic mind, it beggars belief that two same-sex adults can have erotic feelings for each other.

But who are we to question the legitimate feelings of others? I came to the USA at age thirty-nine, thinking that I had seen or read all that there was to see and read. I was determined to accept the gay concept in order to feel adequately enlightened, until a seventy-five old man directly hit on me. Then the import of the gay thing also hit me hard; so it actually meant having another person insert his phallus into your posterior region….the thought itself appalled me so much that I was traumatized for days. Beyond this shocking realization, I daily grapple with the question of how necessary it is for anybody to identify themselves by how they have sex, let alone go to the extent of instituting a lifestyle and cultural movement based on sexual orientation. It sounds to me like the Liliputian argument of which side of an egg to crack. But again, who are we to tell others how to have sex? The whole question sounds to me like a voyeur’s indecent intrusion into another’s erotic conduct. Why should I even want to peek into somebody’s window to find out with whom he/she chooses to have sex? It shouldn’t be my business at all, but I see that it is the fixation of others….to the extent that merely having sympathetic attitude towards the gay movement warrants an inquisition of an otherwise fine woman of knowledge and wisdom. Nana Oye Lithur’s cardinal sin is that she has dared to love gays and wishes to grant them their constitutional rights. Just like the Pharisees encircled Jesus for daring to love so-called sinners, the modern day hyenas of empty religion are puffing and huffing at the innocent one. As always, they want to matter best when they point fingers at others’ sins, instead of focusing on their daily misdeeds which have fouled the four winds of the earth.

Our religion is hypocritical because instead of making us loving, honest and generous individuals, it has turned us into crass puritans who daily measure the sins of others in order to feel righteous. It is an act of moral grand-standing to finger-point what one personally views as the sins of others; it surely leads to glossing over one's own sins in order for one to have a false sense of one's own righteousness. That is what Pharisees do best. The truly good individual is the one who constantly searches himself or herself for traces of flaws, not the one pointing fingers at others for excuses to hate. Right does not mean righteous. To be righteous, one has to have the compassion and wisdom to grant each person his right to live, to laugh and to love. One has to look beyond the daily prescriptions of those who will kill for God, those who will hound the unholy other, or those the sum of whose religion consists in the magnification of another person’s sins.

I can forgive the clergy for their hypocrisy because that has been their congenital habit from the beginning of time. The clergy has a hereditary propensity to be pretentious! But for the National Union of Ghana Students to join the baying fray beats my imagination. Here we are with a youthful group that must be futuristic in their thinking, tolerant in their attitudes and conscious of the trends of the modern world. They are now threatening to go on the streets against a single qualified woman because she has a good heart for gays and lesbian. And their reason? The values of our society override any constitutional right anybody might have!! How so retarded and asinine? Where would we be if some notional concept were to be deemed superior to a constitutional clause? And when has it been our habit to espouse mass hatred as a value? Is it a Ghanaian value to hate somebody because of how she or he has sex? Is it our religious value to persecute those who have divergent opinions other than ours? And when does it become a cardinal sin to disagree with the laws of our country and to express an opinion about them? When does mere opinion become a bar to service to one’s country or service to God?

In the matter of gays and lesbians, Ghanaians, who are rarely united over anything, are now united in their mass hysteria because the gay issue gives them the fodder for uninhibited hatred. The typical Ghanaian bigot appears to have a certain orgasm titillated by raw hatred for the “evil” other. He begins as a hater for someone else not of his ethnic group, then finds a comfort zone against someone else not of his nationality, then graduates to hate someone else not of his color, and finally ends up hating someone else not of his sexual orientation. In one fell swoop, the typical Ghanaian bigot traverses the bounds of ethnocentrism to nationalism to xenophobia to racism and homophobia, while still latching on to the religion that asks him to love all sinners unconditionally. We forget all about our lives as pedophiles, rapists, sadists, adulterers and fornicators in order to focus on the innocuous conduct of the gay and the lesbians. We forget about our lives as religious charlatans and crooks, thieves, cheats, confident tricksters and corrupt politicians and rather hate those whose acts do no harm to us and about whom we know nothing. We bunch together to audit the lifestyles of people of different sexual orientation who we have never met, to demonize them, to ostracize them, to castigate them and to get ready to lynch them. After that, we approach the altar of God like the Pharisee and cry out in self laudation: “Thank God we are not like these sinners, for we go to church, pay our tithes and pray every day.” But our mode of worship and most intelligent brainwave are stuck in medieval darkness, defying the current gravity towards progressive thinking. We are trapped in the darkness of the past because it affords us the cloak of fakery and the orgasm of self-righteousness…

All over the world, gay and lesbian rights are being recognized. There is a paradigm shift away from anti-sodomy laws as encapsulated in Bowers v. Hardwick towards the better reasoning articulated in Lawrence v. Texas. Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The laws on the books in Ghana are therefore archaic, and must be repealed to give full meaning to the privacy laws as enshrined in Lawrence v. Texas. And in this, Nana Oye Lithur is far ahead of her time.

Finally, people should rather be bothered about what they can do right for the country, how honest they are at the work place, how punctual to work, how friendly and hospitable they are to minorities and not how others have sex in the privacy of their bedrooms. That, to me, has no relevance in Ghana's socioeconomic development. Know that hypocrisy disguised as patriotism is never a building block to human progress. Let us stop the hate and live, love and laugh!!!

Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo is a practicing lawyer in Austin, Texas. You can email him at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com