The Communication Director for the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Yaw Buaben Asamoah has called on the Speaker of Parliament to exercise restraint with his comments on the LGBQI Bill before Ghana’s Parliament.
According to him, the Speaker of Parliament should be seen as impartial and as the referee of the House in order not to raise an eyebrow on the final determination of the bill.
“I think on this matter he is getting too involved, he is not being the referee that he ought to be and I think it will be important he steps back a bit. So that whenever he is called to make a determination it will be accepted on all sides. Because it is almost as if he has made up his mind.
“Many believe that he is a promoter of the bill, but as a Speaker, you embody the house. You are not part of the disputations, you have to be above it. The way he is going about it is a bit tricky. But he is smart and knows what he is doing,” Buaben Asamoa told Nana Aba Anamoah on Starr Chat Wednesday.
The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin, has disclosed that Parliament will employ common sense in passing the anti-gay bill before the House.
The bill before the House has been christened “the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Right and the Ghanaian Family Values,” for some time now, it has generated heated national conversations.
According to the Speaker, despite the many controversies that the bill has generated it is healthy for Ghana’s democracy.
“In fact, it has assumed some different dimensions. For me, this is healthy for a maturing democracy like Ghana. It is important we allow various shapes of opinions to canvass their position on the bill. As Ghanaians, I want to plead that we accommodate the views of others on whatever perception they have and let’s maintain the peace that we have.
“It is a law that will take into consideration the richness of common sense, human decency, morality, fact and logic. At the end of the day it will be a law that will transform this country into something else,” he stated during his opening remarks as Parliament reconvened on Tuesday.
However, the NPP Communication Director has called for tolerance and respect for other divergent views on the bill.
“People need to be able to share their viewpoints without being attacked. For me, the biggest space is tolerance. We ought not to be emotional about other feelings about it. We are literally still transitioning from what we used to believe into the new,” he advised.
