Ghana's Myopic Constitution

Appearing before the Parliamentary Vetting Committee in February, Ghana's Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Ms. Marietta Appiah-Oppong, observed that the country's Fourth-Republican Constitution "frowns" upon gay and lesbian rights, for this sacred document of government, and governance, clearly states that "unnatural carnal knowledge is a criminal offence."

Ms. Appiah-Oppong therefore admonished those who believed in the protection of the rights of Ghanaian homosexuals to take their grievance to the Supreme Court for a definitive interpretation thereof (See "Constitution Frowns Upon Gay Rights - Justice Minister-Designate" JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 2/7/13).

What is quite amusing here, and that which piques my interest more than any other aspect of this sticky national debate, is the legal phrase of "unnatural carnal knowledge [being] a criminal offence."

Actually, this is an edict which is Biblically based, in the case of our British-inherited modern Ghanaian political culture. It is Biblically based because much of Western law and ethics is Christocentric or, properly speaking, Judeo-Christocentric. The idea of "natural carnal knowledge" clearly presupposes an engagement in coitus or sexual intercourse that leads to procreation or the reproduction and replenishment of the human species.

But that most instances of sexual intercourse do not lead to procreation, does not appear to have been recognized by the framers, or actually "compilers" of Ghana's Fourth-Republican Constitution. And so the next most logical question becomes: Does the Constitution endorse the engagement of sexual intercourse as a recreational activity or a mere act of pleasure?

If so, how frequent ought such act not to be engaged in order for it not to be legally deemed to be tantamount to a flagrant act of promiscuity? Obviously, the Parliamentary Vetting Committee missed the proverbial boat in not ingeniously posing the foregoing questions to the Attorney-General.

Had the PVC proceeded down the foregoing route, no doubt, it would have arrived at the most logical conclusion, which is clearly that fundamentally speaking, there is absolutely no such thing as "unnatural carnal knowledge," let alone one that is a criminal offence, short of rape or the forcible engagement in coition against either the will and/or desire of one of the participants.

What I am trying to get at here is that there is absolutely nothing "unnatural" about any activity that occurs in nature, including homicide or murder. The question of whether homosexual intercourse and/or murder, a patently repugnant moral breach, is a criminal offence, is a totally different ball-game altogether, as it were.

And so the logical question that ought to be asked, in order to put paid to all the nonsensical ranting raging over the right of LGBT people to live their lives in peace and quiet, devoid of unprovoked aggression and persecution is: Precisely what makes homosexual intercourse a criminal offence, while heterosexual adulterers are awarded medals for conjugal heroism?

Interestingly, we are also told that, indeed, so cognitively myopic were the framers and compilers of Ghana's Fourth-Republican Constitution that these "clinical knuckleheads" actually defined homosexual intercourse as one that primarily entailed sodomy, or the insertion of the male genital into the anal corridor of another male (See Section 104 of the Criminal Offences Act of Ghana's 1992 Constitution). What this means is that lesbian intercourse, which is widely known to involve the use of phallic toys is characterized, by default, as a perfectly normal sexual act by the constitutional compilers, because it does not even feature in the Criminal Offences Act section of the Constitution!

What the foregoing means is that either the framers and compilers of Ghana's Fourth-Republican Constitution were too sexist or unpardonably naive in their knowledge and understanding of homosexuality, or they were simply out of their league on a subject that they, perhaps, ought to have skirted or wholly ignored altogether.

Needless to say, it would have been far more savvy to have left the question of sexual legislation to a better qualified and more enlightened generation to determine in future.

Presently, what we have is a half-assed definition of homosexuality which is as good as nothing. And this is a more dangerous situation in which to put the citizens of a tradition- and culture-oriented country like Ghana, than simply leaving the legality of homosexuality to a bevy of equally confused and culturally and religiously oriented citizens on the Supreme Court.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
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