Back To Time-Honoured Bulwark Against 'Gayism'

The highly emotive debate whether sex deviants, popularly and permissively called gays, should be seen or heard which died down following late Professor John Evans Atta Mills' strong rebuke to British Prime Minister David Cameron, has reared its ugly head in the last month or so, since Mrs Oye Lithur's nomination as minister-designate for Gender, Children and Social Protection..

Agitation against her confirmation, which rose to fever pitch, as she went through vetting, has failed to subside, following her confirmation. It has rather been augmented avoidably by a novice Information Minister's uncalled for eye-service. The issue now dominates the airwaves.

Mrs Lithur cannot be gay, she has a male husband and four children. It is wishing for the moon to suggest that her professional specialisation as a human rights lawyer, in pursuit of which she is bold enough to publicly count gays as clients, should be a bar to her becoming a minister of state.

Ghanaians, like other Africans, believe that homosexuality/lesbianism is a disease which people are born with, in other words it is naturally occurring in some. Besides, it is commonly believed that greenhorn first year students in all-male and all-female second-cycle institutions are forcibly introduced to it by some depraved seniors and become addicted to it.

'Gayism', we must recall, is openly celebrated in Europe and America, where many of our elite, if not all of them, went to school. And all leaders there, and not David Cameron alone, are ready to make it a condition for aid, if given half a chance. So the issue is a deep-rooted one that must be fought using the most effective of weapons.

The Chronicle totally agrees with all those against any public demonstration of support or encouragement for people becoming homosexuals because it is against our collective and inherent constitutional makeup as Ghanaians and Africans. But the way to confront the gay menace and wrestle it to ground, or if we are to have any chance of doing so, is not through serial calling and jaundiced pontificating on radio.

In the considered view of The Chronicle, the only effective way to checkmate 'gayism' is at the family level, the nuclear family level. Children should grow up seeing parents sharing the same bed and showing open affection to each other - man to woman, woman to man. No child, who has no genetic defect, and so brought up and given a special pep-talk before departing for the boarding house can become a homosexual or lesbian, no matter the temptation.

Women have a special role to play here, especially the educated. They should remember where, the environment that it has pleased God Almighty to have them born into. They should be careful how they ape foreign cultural practices hook, line and sinker.

They should desist from flippantly packing bag and baggage, abandoning their matrimonial homes and taking the children with them and deliberately poisoning their minds against their fathers.

A woman who deliberately instigates her daughter against her father is turning her into a man hater and egging her on into the arms of another girl who has also been instigated against her own father by her mother. That is a sure way to lesbianism. No girl, born and bred in Africa, with the deep-seated desire to bear her own children, so openly displayed right from infancy, would willingly become a lesbian, unless pushed. Seriously pushed by a trusted mentor.

The fight against homosexuality cannot be won on radio. It can only be at the basic level. And the time is now.