Getty PicturesAccording to a top cardinal from Ghana, homosexuality should n’t be illegal and people should be educated about the problem.
Cardinal Peter Turkson’s remarks are made as a costs imposing severe penalties on Gay people is being discussed in parliament.
His opinions conflict with those of other Ghanaian Roman Catholic priests, who view homosexuality as “despicable.”
Pope Francis stated last month that he would be willing to have the Catholic Church bless same-sex lovers.
But, he continued, the Church would not accept same-sex marriage because it still regarded such relationships as “objectively sinful.”
The Ghanaian bishops also urged American nations to” stop the continuous attempts to impose intolerable foreign cultural values on us” in a statement published in August, according to the Catholic Herald newspaper, along with other prominent Christian organizations in the nation.
In July, Ghanaian MPs supported actions in a bill that would render identifying as LGBT punished by incarceration for three years. The bill has still not been approved by parliament. Campaigners for LGBT right may also spend up to ten years in prison.
Gay sex now violates the law and carries a three-year prison term.
Cardinal Turkson, who has occasionally been seen as a potential bishop member, stated on the BBC’s HARDtalk program that “LGBT people may not be criminalized because they’ve committed no crime.”
” It’s time to start training, to help people comprehend what this fact, this sensation is.” He continued,” We need a lot of knowledge to get people to… distinguish between what constitutes crime and what does not constitute violence.
The priest made reference to the phrase “men who act like women and women who acting like guys” in Akan, one of Ghana’s official language. This, he claimed, was proof that homosexuality was never imposed from without.
If we had cultural expressions, it would simply indicate that Ghanaian world is not entirely mysterious to it.
However, Cardinal Turkson asserted that he believed that “attempts to reference some foreign donations and grants to specific positions… in the name of independence, in-the-name of respect for rights” were what had prompted the current efforts to pass stringent anti-gay measures in many African countries.
A law that calls for the death sentence for so-called aggravated scenarios, which include having queer sex with someone under the age of 18 or when someone contracts a life-long condition like HIV, and the life sentence for anyone found guilty of sexuality were both approved by Uganda’s parliament in May.
Due to the measure, the World Bank stopped making new loans to Uganda in August. In October, President Joe Biden announced that the US would be removing Uganda from a favorable trading arrangement due to “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
When Pope John Paul II appointed Cardinal Turkson in 2003, he became the first-ever Ghanaian friar. He currently serves as governor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences.
