By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I have sat through a couple of his sermons during which the Columbia University-educated Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG) obsessively lambasted homosexual lifestyle. While, indeed, the Judeo-Christian religion proscribes the gay and lesbian lifestyle, Christianity also counsels charity and humility and frowns upon arrogance and cultural chauvinism. Which is why I have often been wracked with great amusement and wistful anguish to see Rt.-Rev. Emmanual Martey summarily chuck caution to the wind, as it were, while deafeningly raving against a behavioral trait that even the most distinguished geneticists tell us may well be innate among the practitioners of the gay lifestyle. It hasn't also helped that sometimes the PCG leader has innocently quoted the great ancient Greek homosexual philosophers and thinkers in caustic castigation of their modern-day behavioral kinsfolk.
The preceding notwithstanding, nobody can reasonably dispute the right of the spiritual leader of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana to be vehemently averse to homosexual lifestyle, and even homosexual existence. But the fact of the matter is that we also live in a secular democratic culture, and one that is bound by the universally accepted tenets of human rights, which stipulates the need to maintaining a spirit of tolerance and acceptance of racial, ethnic and cultural diversity as integral elements of human identity.
In other words, it is all well and good for religious leaders like Moderator Martey to envisage homosexuality as a curable canker; that is his personal opinion for which, according to his denominational doctrine, he will stand before his Maker at the End of Time - whatever the latter may be - to justify. Put more bluntly, Moderator Martey's personal beliefs, regardless of the subject, are essentially his own. He, however, also reserves his human and constitutional right to preach and practice those beliefs within the legally and socially sanctioned context of his faith.
Nevertheless, as a formidable and a major Ghanaian religious leader whose voice and authority carry enormous weight and have far-reaching consequences, both positive and negative, it is quite edifying to hear Moderator Martey also preach and promote the immutable and inalienable and inviolable sanctity of life. In other words, while he continued to thunderously denounce homosexual lifestyle and existence, without the cautionary note regarding the inviolable sanctity of life, he merely added his revered and remarkably weighty voice to the dangerous chorus of the lynchmob, thus inadvertently devaluing his status and stature as a committed man of God.
Now, with his quite salutary clarification regarding the incontrovertible fact of the human right of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals to a decent existence, devoid of the unprovoked persecution of self-righteous, albeit patently fallible and even morbidly venal, heterosexuals, Dr. Martey has not only restored the aura of unimpeachable dignity that comes with being a Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, he has also made it existentially meaningful and morally attractive to be a Christian.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 6, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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