Catholic Bishop’s confab throws weight behind passage of LGBTQ+ bill

 The Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference (GCBC) has thrown its weight behind the passage of the LGBTQ Bill, saying it must be passed into law to protect authentic Ghanaian family values which are under threat from ho­mosexual acts.

While the Church speaks of homosexual acts as sins, the State, it said, does not use such lan­guage, the Church recognizes that the State had a duty to carry out measures it considered dangerous to society.

“For the State, whose duty it is to enact laws to govern the citizenry, the language used is that of crime. A Crime may be defined as an action or omission, which constitutes an offence and is usually deemed socially harmful or dangerous and is punishable by law.

In the light of this definition, homosexual acts from the point of view of the State may be criminal in nature,” the statement explained.

It said if the state views homo­sexual acts as not in the interest of the nation and, indeed, harm the nation, it was necessary to in­troduce punitive measures to deal with such situations.

“The law makers may decide that a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman is not in the interest of the nation since, in the long term, it will have an ef­fect on the size of the population of our country if many people do this.

In such a case, the law makers will be within their rights to enact laws against that. In such cases, it will be right for the law makers to criminalise such homosexual actions by punitive measures,” the statement added.

The GCBC argued that while it was not right to criminalise homo­sexuals just for being homosexu­als, the State was within its right to criminalise the acts of homosexu­als in the interest of the nation.

It said while the church does not condemn homosexuals for being homosexuals, it condemns the ho­mosexual acts that they perform.

“The long-held teaching of the Roman Catholic Church has been that while homosexual people are to be loved and respected and not be discriminated against, homo­sexual acts are intrinsically immor­al and must be condemned.

 BY TIMES REPORTER

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