Impasse: Ghana’s First Cardinal and Bishop’s Conference Break on LGBTQIA+ Rights

In response to the document issued by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine Faith on December 18, 2023, which allows Catholic priests to offer blessings to same-sex couples, the Ghana Catholic Bishop’s Conference released a statement to clarify its stance in relation to the move approved by Pope Francis. The statement affirmed the doctrinal definition of marriage as the “exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children” in which “… sexual relations find their natural, proper, and fully human meaning.” 

As per this definition, the statement reiterated that “priests cannot bless same-sex unions or marriages,” and that any prayers offered for those “in the state of sin” are “meant to lead them to conversion. Therefore, the prayers for persons in same-sex relations are not intended to legitimize their way of life, but to lead them n to the path of conversion.” 

This stance sharply breaks from that of Cardinal Peter Turkson, Ghana’s first Cardinal appointed by Pope John Paul II. Turkson appeared on HARDtalk on the BBC, hosted by Stephen Sackur, when Sackur pressed the Cardinal on the issue of Gay rights in Ghana and Africa. In reference to Uganda’s extreme anti-Gay laws and the country’s Catholic church leadership’s silence on the matter and the Ghana Catholic Bishop’s Conference’s description of homosexuality as ‘despicable,’ Sackur asked: “Is it time to move away from this kind of language?”

“It is time to begin education to help people understand what this phenomenon is,” Turkson said in response. Earlier in the program, Turkson referenced expressions in his native Akan language that denote “men who act like women and women who act like men,” concluding that the concept of homosexuality “was known in the culture and the community…, but nobody went on to make any policy out of it.” 

Turkson also opined that hostility toward LGBTQIA+ rights in Africa is tied to “the perception that the West is imposing this, connecting it to… linking it to some donations and grants…” politicizing it “in such a way that the reaction to it has also been equally political in character.” Following in the steps of Uganda, the Ghanaian parliament introduced the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill in 2021, which sought to criminalize LGBTQIA+ relationships and those who support them, including journalists who would be seen as “promoting” these issues. 

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Similar to Uganda, the bill also encourages regular citizens to denounce suspected gender and sexual minorities to the police as a “duty to report.” The Bill went through a second reading and debate in July 2023, months after Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed Uganda’s draconian anti-Gay bill into law. Member of Parliament for Asante Akim North, Andy Appiah-Kubi, who made the initial submission of the Bill to the Ghanaian Parliament expressed confidence that Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo would sign the bill into law before it was unanimously passed with 275 members of parliament voting in favor. 

“I know that the day the bill is passed, I will be in jail for five years or more. That is the truth,” warned openly Trans Ghanaian singer Angel Maxine in an interview with gal-dem in January 2023. “All I see is disaster… If you live with a queer person and the bill says you have the right to report them under the bill, then people will use it. And people who have done absolutely nothing wrong will be sent to prison- and we don’t even know the reality of being queer in prison.” 

An escalation in homophobic attacks in the country was witnessed shortly before and after the Bill was accented to by the Ghanaian Parliament. Four men were reportedly beaten up in Kumasi on suspicion of being Gay in April 2023, while in July, a man was stabbed multiple times after being lured to a location via a dating app, GhanaWeb reported.  

The Ghana Catholic Bishop’s Conference also issued a lengthy statement in favor of the bill, stating that “Homosexuality is also incompatible with the creation stories about man and woman in Genesis,” while listing bible verses from both the Old and the New Testaments that discuss and prescribe against Homosexuality. While reaffirming that Homosexuals are “also created in the image of God” and should enjoy “the fundamental human rights that all human beings enjoy” that are “universal, inviolable, and inalienable rights,” the church, according to its understanding of human rights, does not consider “the right of a man to marry a man or of a woman to marry a woman” as an inalienable human right. 

“We commend our lawmakers for the effort and time spent on this bill. It is our hope that, when passed into law, it will indeed promote proper human sexual rights and authentic Ghanaian family values which are under threat from homosexual acts. It is also the hope of the Church that the bill will impose punitive measures that are commensurate with the crimes committed.”  

Cardinal Turkson, however, heralded a time of learning for Africans to jumpstart the understanding of LGBTQIA+ individuals. “Because I think we need a lot of education to get people to separate; make a distinction between what is a crime and what is not [a] crime… something that traditionally may be referred to as a taboo and all that. It takes time,” Turkson said.  

_{Photos: Youtube Screengrab, Unsplash}