US Ambassador to Ghana Virginia Palmer has told local station JoyNews that calls for the protection of the rights of persons of same-sex orientation should not be misinterpreted as an attempt to promote such interests.
“We don’t want your straight children to be gay, we want your gay children to be safe and I think it is very important that any sort of threat on one group demonstrates that the rights of other people can be encroached upon,” she said.
Speaking in an interview with JoyNews’ Foreign Affairs program, Ambassador Palmer stated that discrimination of all kinds is bad, hence the need for social protection measures to safeguard the minority group.
Intimate same-sex relationships are punishable in Ghana with a prison term of three years.
A bill named the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values”, was proposed months after Ghana’s first LGBT community centre opened in Accra in January last year.
The bill seeks to increase jail terms to up to a decade and makes cross-dressing and public displays of same-sex affection punishable by fines or detention. It also makes the distribution of material deemed pro-LGBT by news organisations or websites illegal.
