Associate Professor of Leadership and Management at Viterbo University, Professor Enoch Opoku Antwi, has stated that not all Americans agree with the legalisation of homosexuality in the US.
Prof. Antwi, who has taught courses in diversity in the US for a long time, noted that people have to state their pronouns to avoid being accused of “micro-aggression.”
Reacting to the passage of the Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill 2024 on The Key Points on Saturday, March 9, Prof. Antwi said, “Now even as I write emails in the US, I have to put my pronouns, he, him, his, or she, hers, her.”
“Because you have to state your pronouns for students to know where you stand, other than that, you will be charged with micro-aggression, meaning you are being aggressive towards one’s sexual orientation, so you have to state your pronouns in every email that you write,” Prof Antwi stated.
Prof Antwi further pointed out that it wasn’t the American Congress that passed the LGBTQ+ law, indicating that the state of California voted against LGBTQ+.
“Remember the way Americans passed this law, it wasn’t the Congress because America started Proposition 18 [Proposition 8] from California and Proposition 18 from California meant that the whole state had to vote YES or NO for LGBT and the first time the state voted NO,” he stressed.
“So when people sit here and say Americans like LGBT, it is not every American who agrees to LGBTQ.”
According to Prof Antwi, President Obama at the time went to the American Supreme Court to pass the LGBT law.
“When it went to the Supreme Court, the framers of the American Constitution knew that the weakest wing of all the three arms is the judiciary because you have only nine people if you are able to convince just five out of the nine, you pass.
“So [former President] Obama went straight to the Supreme Court and we had five out of the nine passing it so Americans woke up one day and gay was passed,” said Prof Antwi.
“So these things that we are talking about I don’t know why we didn’t bring in the experts to talk about it,” he quizzed, adding, “Everything in politics, when we talk about leadership, is about framing.”
He further explained that policies should be framed morally, stating that he liked how the “Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill” was framed.
He, however, noted that, as far as the LGBTQ+ community is concerned, even the US is currently studying queer people.
“There was a lady in Minnesota who was pregnant for nine months and had a baby and then the guy said that he is not the father. They did a DNA test, when the result came in the guy was the father but the woman who had carried the the baby in her womb for nine months was not the mother of the child—intersex,” he said, indicating that there are a lot of ambiguities and the [being] LGBTQ+ is “a very complicated thing.”