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Majority Leader in Parliament Alexander Afenyo-Markin has insisted the custodial sentencing regime prescribed in the anti-gay bill is draconian.
To him, throwing persons into jail for homosexuality will not cure the problem.
Speaking in an interview with Berla Mundi on the New Day show on TV3 on Thursday, February 29, the Effutu lawmaker said “I am not here being an advocate for LGBTQ, I am looking at how we can reintegrate, how we can deal with the issue in a way that it will not get worse.
“Sodomy takes its root from the prisons, people get sodomized in our prison and in our cells. I am a practitioner of the law, I have done criminal cases for many years and sometimes when your clients are being sent to cells, the police themselves will tell you to make sure that he is not taken to Accra central, you ask why, and they tell you that this thing is done there. They tell us. Why are we pretending that we don’t know the everyday story on our streets?
“How does conviction and incarceration solve the problem? For me, on balance, since it is a behavioral challenge, engage some clinical psychologists on it. I engaged them prior to my views publicly and three of them I engaged, they told me clearly that when dealing with issues of behavioral addictions, you don’t play the hard ball to get solutions, do you incarcerate a drug addict? You create a space for rehabilitation, that rehabilitation will require some therapy or some procedure to get the person out of that behaviour, you don’t put the person in a situation where that behaviour will be reinforced.
“So you say the person is gay, or lesbian and you throw the person in jail, will you get the result that you want? I beg to differ.”
Ghana’s Parliament on Wednesday, February 28 passed the anti-LGBTQI bill after successfully going through all three reading stages.
“3rd reading of the anti-lgbtq bill passed by parliament, the bill has been passed, ” TV3’s Parliamentary correspondent Komla Klutse reported.
One of the sponsors of the bill, Ningo-Prampram Lawmaker Samuel Nartey George told journalists after the passage that “We want to thank Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu who was very instrumental in passing this bill.”
“The house has stood united, an overwhelming majority of both sides of the house have supported this bill,” he added.
NKONKONSA.com
