Reverend John Ntim Fordjour, a sponsor of the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, 2025, has raised concerns about President John Dramani Mahama’s failure to deliver on his repeated promises to introduce the bill as a government-sponsored legislation.
This follows the presentation of another bill by the MP and nine others for its first reading in Parliament.
According to Rev. Fordjour, the President has had ample opportunity since assuming office to act on his public assurances but has yet to bring the bill before Parliament.
“If the President was so, you know, committed to introducing government-sponsored bill, this is the 11th month. There have been many, many, leading to over 100 bills that have been brought to this house that we have passed. Some were even brought in midnight. We stayed here midnight and passed them under Certificate of Urgency,” he said during an interview in Accra on Tuesday October 21.
“So if this bill was that important to him, and indeed is not mere rhetorics and something he’s committed to, he would have introduced this government-sponsored bill. He has said it time and time again. Has he brought it? So let him bring it.”
Rev. Fordjour made it clear that while Parliament would support any future version introduced by the government, it should not replace the bill currently under consideration.
“When President Mahama brings a government-sponsored bill to the stature of the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill. We will all support, but that will not take away the importance that this bill is going to serve. So let’s all support. Let’s pass it.”
He added that Parliament is determined to pass the current bill and submit it to the President for assent, while remaining open to any additional legislation that aligns with Ghanaian values.
“We will pass this, would submit it to the President, present it to him for his assent, and he can also, even in the course of the process, whether before it is passed or after it is passed, if he so thinks that he even needs to introduce some more robust legislation to serve the larger purpose of preserving the values of Ghana, preserving the values of society, and augmenting on the binary nature of gender, that any person is born a boy or a girl, and that’s when you are to marry. Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Rev. Fordjour also expressed concern over what he described as growing advocacy that promotes LGBTQ+ lifestyles, calling it misleading and harmful to the youth.
“Those basic principles and any such propagation and, you know, advocacies and those that seek to even make lesbianism, LGBT, and all its allies and dimensions more attractive, you know, totally, totally misleading young people and leading them astray—any legislation that will cure that is further welcomed. But that will not come to replace the importance and necessity of this bill.”
The Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill is currently before Parliament and seeks to criminalise LGBTQ+ advocacy and practices in Ghana.
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