Homosexuality a mental disorder, not biological – Akwasi Osei

Professor Akwasi Osei, a member of the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, has stated that homosexuality is an abnormal behaviour, mostly learned and not biologically determined.

Prof Osei, who is also the Chief Executive Officer of the Mental Health Authority, said the argument that “homosexuality is normal” was, therefore, not tenable.

Prof Osei stated this in his presentation to the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee of Parliament public hearing on the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values 2021 Bill”, in Accra.

“Just about one to three per cent of any society in the world are homosexuals, the vast majority are straight, so 97 to 99 per cent are straight,” he stated.

“So, if you have only one to three per cent (being homosexuals), how do you say it is so common that you want to consider it as normal?”

The presentation of the Coalition focused on addressing the real issues of LGBT.

He emphasised that people learned homosexuality as a habit; adding that only a few homosexuals were born with the homosexual tendencies.

Prof. Osei said the assertion that the biological base of homosexuality was scientific was false and that homosexuality was not a human right.

There was no national record of on LGBTQI individuals but a study by an NGO indicated that there were about 650,000 people in the country with homosexual (LGBTQI) tendencies, he explained.

He said the total number constituted about 0.02 per cent of the Ghanaian population, saying “how can you say 0.02 per cent is a common phenomenon and therefore, it is normal?”

Prof Osei said a majority of homosexuals learnt it from peer pressure, while others were simply out of adventure and curiosity.

He said there were others who developed a hatred for the opposite sex because of childhood defilement or rape, and as result sometimes became lesbians or gays.

“There is a scientific way of determining what is normal, so, it is not opened to people’s whims and caprices. Normality is determined by the frequency of occurrence, not by birth scientifically……”

Mr Moses Foh-Amoaning, Executive Secretary, National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, said the Coalition had developed a holistic sexual therapy system that addressed the real issues of LGBT people.

He said the Coalition had come to the Bill with about 10 years’ experience investigating, researching and dealing with LGBT people, emphasizing, “hundreds and hundreds of them”.

“So, the question is what is the strategic goal of the LGBT Movement? Is there an LGBT Moment? Yes. That is a distinction must be made between those who lobby, who fund, who push the idea….

“A distinction must be made between those people and then those who are genuinely involved in those activities and suffer for it because of biological reasons, psychological reasons and other reasons,” he stated.

Mr Foh-Amoaning said the basic strategic goal of the LGBT Moment was “to say that all of us must accept homosexuals and other LGBT behaviour, they don’t change, that is their strategic goal. Their basic strategy is propaganda, lies, half-truths, that is what they do”.

He said the LGBT Movement’s strategy was to move away from what they did to focus on abstract things – such as human rights and minority rights.

Mr Foh-Amoaning said the greatest single victory of the gay movement was shifting the debate from their behaviour to identity.

He alleged that some NGOs were being funded to promote the LGBT Agenda in the country.

Prof Afua Hesse, a member of the Coalition, said the Bill provided for the medical care of children and multidisciplinary team for the disorders of sexual development.

Children needed protection from sexual abuse, especially sodomy with sufficient deterrents, she stated.

Likewise, there should be psychosocial and medical health for the victims and the perpetrators as the Bill was proposing and the holistic sexual therapy system, which integrated all the knowledge that one would expect from various scientific areas together.

Source: GNA