General News of Friday, 23 July 2021
Source: www.ghanaweb.live
2021-07-23Poorly written anti-gay bill makes sex between man and woman illegal - Researcher
Oliver Barker-Vormawor is a researcher
• A researcher says the new bill before Parliament to make homosexuality illegal will make sex in its entirety illegal
• Oliver barker-Vormawor says the bill was also poorly written
• The bill is being led by Ningo Prampram lawmaker, Sam George
Should the bill before Parliament seeking to make the practice of homosexuality an illegal act be passed, it will make the practice
Read full article.of sex in its entirety, illegal, Oliver Barker-Vormawor has said.
According to the Cambridge researcher, the bill, which he said was poorly written, will make sex between a man and a woman as illegal as it seeks to do for those involved in same-sex affairs, reports myjoyonline.com.
He explained that without knowing or intending it, the authors of the bill will cause a lot of problems in areas they didn’t even intend to, should the bill receive the blessing of Parliament.
For example, he said, the use of the phrase “pansexual activities” is problematic since it could infer that a man and a woman having sex could also be engaged in this same illegality.
In the bill, led by the Member of Parliament for Ningo Prampram, Sam George, pansexual is described as “a person who engages in a sexual or romantic activity with persons of any gender identity or expression including persons who do not fit into the binary sex categorization of male and female.”
“The law does define what is meant by pansexual activities, and it says a pansexual means a person who engages in sexual or romantic activity with a person of any gender.
“Now this is important because by this meaning, if you say that pansexual activity is wrong, then it implies that if a person is engaged in sexual or romantic activity with persons of any gender, then they would be doing something criminal.
“By this view, if a guy engages in sex with his wife, obviously the wife is of a different gender. So, by that intellect, the law is implying that this is a pansexual activity. So, what I am saying is that they have ended up banning sex in its entirety because of the improper definition of what they’ve done. And this problem persists across the bill,” he explained as reported by myjoyonline.
The “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill 2021,” bill is expected to ensure that culprits face a jail term of up to ten years depending on the crime they commit, as stated in this bill.