The Nation Newspaper

Tag: gay marriage

  • Anti-gay law against fundamental rights – EU

    The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton has expressed concern about same sex marriage prohibition Act recently signed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Ashton noted that the Act is in contradiction with the 1999 Constitution and international agreements to which Nigeria is a party.

    EU in a statement issued on Wednesday in Abuja said it opposes discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation.

    “I am concerned about the signing into law in Nigeria of the same sex marriage prohibition act.

    “The European Union is opposed to discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. It is firmly committed to human rights and rule of law in respect of those rights, including freedom of association, conscience and speech and equality of persons. It supports the respect of human rights in all countries of the world.

    “I am therefore particularly concerned that some provisions of the Act appear to be contradiction with those fundamental rights, which are themselves guaranteed by Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution, and to be inconsistent with the legal obligations enshrined in a number of international agreements to which Nigeria is a party,” Ashton said.

     

  • Canada faults ‘criminalization’ of gay marriage

    Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, Tuesday expressed concern about criminalization of homosexuality in Nigeria.

    In a terse press statement issued by the Canadian Embassy and made available to journalists in Abuja, Baird called on Nigeria to repeal the law.

    He also urged Nigeria government to promote and protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all Nigerians regardless of their sexual orientation.

    He said, “Canada has clearly spoken out against human rights violations committed against people on the basis of their sexuality, and we will continue to do so.

    “Canada is deeply concerned that Nigeria has adopted a law that further criminalizes homosexuality. This law can be used to impose prison sentences of up to 14 years.

    “We call on Nigeria to repeal this law and to promote and protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all Nigerians regardless of their sexual orientation.

    “Canada has clearly spoken out against human rights violations committed against people on the basis of their sexuality, and we will continue to do so.”

     

  • Gay marriage in Europe is political, says Russian missionary

    Gay marriage in Europe is political, says Russian missionary

    The Senior Pastor of International Gospel Centre, Berlin, Germany, Pastor Ivannik Valeriy is one whose ministry has spanned over two decades with over 120 churches in Europe. He spoke to Adeola Ogunlade about his ministry, christianity in Europe, gay marriage and other sundry issues at the 20th anniversary of World Evangelical Bible Church in Lagos

    Tell us about your ministry

    I am a Russian, born in the city of Etovia. I married in Ukraine. I have my background in broadcasting journalism. In 1989, I started my ministry, a year after I gave my life to Christ. My encounter with Jesus brought a drastic change to my life. I went everywhere In Ukraine teaching and encouraging people around me and they gladly embraced the gospel and within a year of my encounter with Jesus, we had 400 people who always come to me to learn more about Jesus. We were living in a communist state and the people were tired and were looking for a way out. The people were predominantly Catholic; they gave their lives to Jesus Christ which led to the establishment of our ministry with over 120 churches across Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. Our vision is moving to different countries and planting more churches and our main message in all of our churches is love God and love your neighbour as yourself  irrespective of your nationalities, colour and do all you can to help other people.

    We are glad that we have different nationalities which include Africans, Germans, and we now working on the nationals in India, Philippines.

    Why is your message centred on love?

    It is disturbing when people because of different ethnic, tribal and language differences are always in conflict with each other. When we see conflict anywhere, we must understand that somebody is somewhere making profit out of the conflict. Most times politicians force people to fight for their own interest and it could be connected with crude oil, diamond or any other mineral resources. And we see war because of conflict. All these are results of lack of love. We tell people that politicians should not put us into war and religious people should stop fighting each other. Jesus calls us into love and peace.

    God commanded us to love each other. Pastor and other ministers read the same bible which is love one another but we find excuse not to love one another. I know there is peace but people always want to fight each other. I want to love everyone and I wish peace and prosperity are visible in Nigeria.

    Your evaluation of the state of the Church in Europe?

    I have been living in Germany for 10 years. We have the ruling party which is called Christian Democratic Party and this party has moved the country to one of the leading countries in Europe with their social service programmes for the people. No country in the world that takes cares of its people like the German government. It is always the reverse when the people in government are far away from God. Even they may seem to know God or are associated with any church but the country will continue to face hardship when they are far away from God. Meanwhile, what is worrisome is that In Germany, the churches are small and weak because the God of the people is their government and they don’t need to pray because when they need food, the government is there to feed them. But in Africa, it’s different as there are lots of problems and we believe that they can all be overcome by faith in Jesus.

    In Germany, you may be leaving with your neighbour for years and you don’t know who he is and as a result, they suffer downward depression. Germany spends over $9 million annually to fight depression. We have everything such as foods, houses, cloth, and children up to 27 years of age get kingdom support from the government and you want to believe that the people should be happy but the sad story is that they have neglected God.  Although Africans need God too, they are better off because common problems bring us together to pray to God and am very happy to be associated with Africans.

    Why the death of the gospel in Europe?

    Sowing and reaping will never cease. European brought the gospel to Africa and now it’s time that the African churches need to take the gospel back to Europe. There is a time when some countries are rich and they feed other cities and there are other times when they have problem and they become poor and thus countries that have benefited from their support should look back and support these countries. I was preached to by a Georgian and I did not ask God why a Georgian was preaching to me. Israel took the gospel to Europe but now Europeans are taking the gospel back to Israel. I believe it is a normal trend and now the time has come for Africans to give spiritual food to the world. We should learn to support one another.

    What is your take on the wide acceptance of gay marriage across Europe?

    My view is that anything that is happening here on earth, somebody is losing and somebody else is gaining.  The gospel cannot travel itself as somebody is always behind everything. I believe that there are some spiritual things behind it because the plan of the kingdom of darkness and the inward beast within the earth is to communicate with people who have committed themselves to them. To some of them, they believe that the earth is over populated and very soon, there will not be enough space or mineral resources to go round everyone. They also believe that the wall in the North Pole is melting, the lines are getting smaller and there is no place to dump refuse anymore. Let’s destroy some souls so that we would have enough space and they pay billions of dollars to encourage abortion. Sadly, they are ignorant that the only blessings of any nation are the people. It is not gold, money, durable metals and not even crude oil. Little people will always have a weak government. The influence of the enemy in using them to destroy the world‘s population through viruses, sicknesses and diseases spreading to different parts of the world is just to cut off a certain number of the world population. Evil has taken over and that is why they will tell some African nations that if you want money, give support to gay marriage and it is unfortunate that some nations are bowing down to these kinds of conditions. It is politics. I speak against it because it is evil as it written in the bible in Romans that those who partake in it are worthy of death and not those who do it but those who support or are liberal about it. We have a strict policy against gay marriage in my church. We have programmes on love against gay. We have love for normal families.

  • Australian capital legalises gay marriage

    Australian capital legalises gay marriage

    The Australian Capital Territory has become the first part of Australia to legalise same-sex marriage.

    The ACT parliament passed a bill that will allow gay couples to marry, after a short debate on Tuesday.

    BBC reports that celebrants will now be allowed to marry same-sex couples inside the ACT, regardless of which state they live in.

    Federal law, however, specified in 2004 that marriage was between a man and a woman, and the federal government is expected to challenge the move.

    The move was passed in the 17-member ACT Legislative Assembly, backed by Labor and the Greens, with the Liberals voting against.

    “There is no longer any excuse, if there ever was, to discriminate against same-sex couples in our community,” ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher told the parliament.

    “They are our children, our parents, our brothers, our sisters, our leaders, our business people, our mentors and our colleagues.”

    “More than anything, they are our equals. The Marriage Equality Act puts this fundamental principle and human right into law,” the Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted her as saying.

    Ms Gallagher said that the first weddings could take place by the end of the year.

    Attorney-General George Brandis, however, says the local law will face a legal challenge, because it is inconsistent with the national-level Marriage Act.

    “It would be very distressing to individuals who may enter into a ceremony of marriage under the new ACT law, and to their families, to find that their marriages were invalid,” a statement from the Attorney-General’s Office said.

     

     

  • Still on gay marriage

    Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife remains Nigeria’s cum Africa’s foremost centre of learning. The University is reputed to be among the best designed estates in the world, and no human being no matter how biased ever visits the Great Ife, without coming out with a special kind of feeling about the university’s exquisite beauty and candour. However, beyond and beneath the physical beauty of OAU is a strong tradition of scholarship that has continued to hold its own anywhere in the world. Little wonder the university was recently ranked the best in Nigeria by the popular webometric university ranking organisation.

    Not that the ranking in itself says anything new about the university, but in a country bedevilled by a myriad of negatives, the well-deserved ranking serves as a pointer of hope for the nation. As a Great Ife alumnus, one is quite confident everywhere one goes. This has led many people to erroneously believe that Great Ife Alumni are unnecessarily proud!

    It is against this background that I read with trepidation a piece in The Nation on Sunday, April 7, 2013 in defence of gay marriage written by one Arthur Anyaduba, who claims to be of the Postgraduate School, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife. In the piece, Mr Anyaduba launched into endless diatribe against Mr Femi Fanikayode and other protagonists of the marriage institution whom he nebulously categorised as ‘Religionists’. He went wild claiming that no ‘God or deities ordained at any time one mode of sexuality’ and therefore, ‘no one pattern must be enforced for people to follow’!

    Indeed, in a relatively free society like Nigeria, it is assumed that people should express themselves as one of the fundamental rights of humans. However, even in the expression of one’s opinion there are boundaries because where one’s right stops other’s begin.

    In his defence of gay marriage, Mr Anyaduba vehemently argues that gay marriage is a norm the world over, therefore we must necessarily toe that line. I then begin to wonder where his facts emanate from and even if that be the case, must we, Nigerians, necessarily join the bandwagon. Again, it baffles me that the protagonists of this set of people suffering from the gay disease base their argument upon that ‘others’ are doing it, why not Nigeria.

    In his definition of family, Mr Anyaduba posits that ‘family is a social unit of biologically related people’ and I wonder why he should bring in biology when all the gay people in this world are as a matter of fact anti-biology. This is because, the nature or biology (for those like Anyaduba who don’t believe in God) already cuts out the roles of man and woman sexually. Not done, Mr Anyaduba goes on to tell us that ‘gay marriage is not a threat to marriage (as we know it) and family’. This greatly contradicts all that gay disease is about because one of the natural offshoots of heterosexual people is procreation and that only happens when a man’s semen fertilizes the female egg. This is irrespective of all the breakthroughs of modern science. And the society is peopled by products of man and woman relationship!

    In one breath, Anyaduba argues that no society should determine how people should live, yet in another breath he says that ‘all marriages are products of socio-political and religious situations’ yet he and his ilk are vehemently denying the majority of the Nigerian society the right to determine how we may live in our own land.

    The university community, and especially the Great Ife is a place of progressive research to harness the powers and resources of nature to better the lot of human societies, it’s appalling when some sick people now want to use the rights given them by society to work against nature. The motto of OAU reads: For Learning and Culture. And to all its content the Great Ife has abided by this solemn declaration. As an undergraduate and a campus journalist at OAU. I once interviewed Dapo, a notoriously ‘proud’ gay young man who traversed the OAU campus then, and after a long chat with me I could not but have pity on him as he came off as a young man that was irredeemably sick. After wandering in the wilderness of gay community that took him from Ife to Lagos, London and other European Cities, Dapo a few months ago had a sex-change surgery and today carries herself as a woman somewhere in the Netherlands. The moral of Dapo’s story is that nature and biology have designed human beings in a finite way and have apportioned biological roles accordingly. So, if anyone contracts the gay disease and decides to take the role of a man or woman as the case may be, science now has a lee way-Go do sex change!

    It is a fatal and escapist at best for people to argue ‘rights’ in the defence of illness as a way of life!

    By Mazi Moses Idika

    Maitama, Abuja.

  • In defence of gay marriage

    Most arguments against gay marriage in Nigeria which I have come across reveal two basic things: a violently dangerous conservatism and intolerance, and a disguise of ignorance for morality. More appalling, for me, is that in this postmodern age many of our critics who claim to be well-read expose the most insipid of shallow thinking. I take as my reference point Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode’s article, “The American Supreme Court and Same Sex Marriage” (The Nation on Sunday, March 31, 2013). Mr. Fani-Kayode’s piece summarises, to a large extent, the backward, hypocritical and reductive thinking that characterises the intellectual poverty of many of our so-called elite towards the question of gay marriage.

    In his piece, Fani-Kayode vehemently dismissed the US and many European countries for endorsing what, for him, God has forbidden. In his words, “what is the world coming to? How come we suddenly find it easy to turn our backs on the word of God which specifically defines marriage as a holy union between a man and a woman which was designed primarily for the purpose of procreation?” In the same vein in his characteristic fervour for double-speaking, the blabbering critic sermonised that gay people should, however, be allowed to only “fuck” insofar as they do not extend the act to marriage. Fani-Kayode, a devout conservative Christian as he impliedly asserted, went on to remind us that sexualities cannot be legislated. Yet, those “deviant” sexualities such as gay must not be allowed to materialise into marriage. He sanctimoniously added, “I say ‘yes’ to a tolerant and open society that allows individuals, if they so choose, to be gay… without any legal sanction… At the same time, I say ‘no’ to same sex marriages which I believe are a step too far and a direct attack on the family and God’s purpose for a holy union that is designed and meant to lead to the procreation of children.”

    Mr. Fani-Kayode’s argument smacks of deceit, an utter hogwash, at best. First, “his God” abhors same sex marriage. I ask, does “his God” at the same time endorse gay “fucking” so long as it does not lead to marriage? Why is Fani-Kayode pretending to be accommodating in thinking, when actually his arguments are ultimately contradictory? He should have been courageous enough to simply say he hates the idea of homosexuality, without this puerile pretence to logic. Second, the reductive argument that one “Universal God” ordained heterosexual marriage, and that homosexual relationships are “abominable and morally repugnant” seems to me too debasing, with an amazing lack of depth. Fani-Kayode and many others who adopt this apparently false moral argument must do themselves and the society the simple duty of reading a little beyond their religious scriptures. I ask, which god ordained marriage, let alone a heterosexual marriage in the first instance? All marriages are a product of certain socio-political, religious, and cultural constructs. No god(s) or deity(ies) at any time ordained one mode of sexuality. But for the sake of argument if truly there is such a god as Fani-Kayode’s, who designed and installed a certain mode of sexuality and who Fani-Kayode impliedly claims designed the whole universe, then my question is this: if gay sex is not part of its design, how is it possible that gay practice is rearing its ugly head in this god’s heterosexual design? Why does Fani-Kayode have to fight for this powerful designer of the universe? If there is such a god as the religionists claim, then they should worry their god(s) over the imperfect works of its hands to have allowed something outside its purpose and design to somehow creep in to ruin its art. I make to say with all sense of restraint that this “creation” or “design” that we call world is fundamentally flawed, perhaps a product of a demented divinity! Ironically, the same Europeans who gave Fani-Kayode “a Christian religion” that he is fronting as a universal moral are the ones redefining the basis of that religion. And our frenzied and worried brother cannot comprehend this cultural evolution that stands the dogma of religion on its head.

    Here are my arguments for gay marriage! If individuals in the very least have a right to sex, then they should be as free as to decide for themselves the kind of sexual leaning they desire. Tolerance must accommodate human differences from ethnicity and religion to sexuality. If a man is gay and desires to have a family, should we say to him, “marry a woman to raise a family, but you can go out and “fuck” your male partner at will!” That is what Mr. Fani-Kayode is saying: be gay, but you must never marry!

    Gay marriage is not a threat to the family and marriage institutions as Oga Fani-Kayode opined. In my understanding, a family is a social unit of people biologically or socially related and who live together towards certain bonded ends or even just to live together without any duty bound ends in mind. If this idea of the family holds any water, then no one pattern must be enforced for people to follow.

     

    By Arthur Anyaduba,

    School of Postgraduate Studies,

    Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.