LEGABIBO, the church at loggerheads
Nnasaretha Kgamanyane | Monday July 24, 2023 06:00
In an interview with Mmegi this week LEGABIBO CEO Thato Moruti said they remain resolute in the decisions by the courts declaring the unconstitutionality of section 164 (a) and (c) on November 29th, 2021. Those sections prohibited anal sex. Moruti had therefore called on to legislators not take decisions that would second-guess the courts.
Furthermore, Moruti advised the church and the general public that they do not support nor condone any indoctrination of children. He explained that they offered services to individuals above the ages of 18, which is the age of majority in Botswana. He stated that they were strongly against the propaganda and misinformation used by some Christians that thrusts hate and sidelining of minorities.
“We worry that religion and faith are being weaponised to distort the message of the church which is to encourage love and restoration. We beseech the church institution in Botswana to remember Matthew 22 verse 37-39: Jesus said the second greatest commandment was to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’,” he said. Moruti added that people need not to lose sight of this and therefore refrain from being coerced and misled by Christian fundamentalism that has caused hatred and bullying to disregard human rights protection. “Without the protection of legality, it is impossible to positively impact lives,” he said.
Moreover, he reminded local political leaders and Batswana at large that Botswana as a country should allow judges to decide issues in an impartial manner, based on the facts and law ‘without, improper influences, pressures, threats or interferences from any person’. He also said by institutionalizing discrimination, laws criminalizing homosexuality reinforce systemic disadvantage of lesbians, gay men and bisexual people and against transgender people and act as an official incitement to or justification for violence against them, whether in custody, in prison, on the street or in the home.
“They can result in impunity for arbitrary arrests on the basis of allegations about sexual orientation, rumours of sexual behaviour or objection to gender presentation, with few, if any, consequences for torture or other ill-treatment. We take these laws as permission to target lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, organizations and events as we have seen over the past weekend the church taking to the streets unfounded allegations full of hate and marginalization and using innocent children to fuel Christian propaganda and violence,” he explained.
Moruti further said perceptions of the LGBTIQ+ community were often bound up with stereotyped notions of gender and the norms that were derived from those notions about gender expression. He added that violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, same-sex practicing and transgender people is gender-based violence, inflicted on those who challenge or fail to conform to traditionally defined gender roles.
He added that they had seen in their own country LGBTIQ+ individuals targeted for violence and discrimination by those who perceive them as somehow “deviant”. He reminded Batswana of the Lobatse case in which a lesbian lady and a gay young man were raped in an effort to correct their sexual orientation and the Christian conversion therapy in Goodhope that left the members of the LGBTIQ+ community fearing for their freedom to be a part of a nation said to be free.
However, members of Evangelical Fellowship of Botswana differ as they have publicly declared that they are against the proposed bill. Speaking at a press conference in Gaborone yesterday, Pastor Puafela Siele quoted a verse from the bible 1 Corinthians chapter six, verses nine. The scripture reads as follows; “do you realize that those who do wrong will not inherit the kingdom of God. Do not fool yourselves. Those who indulge in sexual sin or who worship idols or who commit adultery or are male prostitutes or practice homosexuality or are thieves or greedy people or drunkards or are abusive or cheat people none of these will inherit the kingdom of God”.
He further said the scripture indicated that some people were committing the same sins stated above but were cleansed by calling the name of Jesus Christ and the holy spirit of God. He however said God loves ‘us’ all in despite of ‘our ‘sexuality. Siele added that as far as the church was concerned, homosexuality was sinful.
“Homosexuality is a sin. We do not regard it as a special kind of sin compared to any other. We will be doing the same thing if the law intends to legalise stealing or adultery because that is what the scripture is saying. We cannot single out homosexuality as if though it is the only sin. The position of the church is to tell people the truth. We are not saying this sin is bigger than this sin. At the end of the day God loves us all,” Siele explained. Additionally, Siele said if the government intends to legalise homosexuality, all other sexual practices were not legalised therefore homosexuality was not supposed to be legalised. He further reminded the gathering that their body was the temple of the Holy Spirit saying at times people tend to tell themselves that their bodies are their rights.
Siele also said it was important to introduce the LGBTQI+ community to the word and be set free from sin. He added that even scientifically, only three types of sex were recognized been male, female and intersex while there was no scientific evidence on homosexuality. Siele pointed out that intersex was an accident of sex that there was nothing that could be done about it.
“We do not believe as church that homosexuality was by nature or by God’s desire that anybody should be homosexual. I believe it is by individuals’ desire. We shamefully started to lust man after man and woman after woman and therefore the reason why we have homosexuals and adulterous people is because we decided not to worship God,” he further said.
“As the church we believe our government should not enact a law that legalises homosexuality,” he said. He further stated that homosexuality goes against procreation saying a man and a man or a woman and a woman could not procreate saying it was like a birth control method. Pastor Siele also said the act on its own was destructive to people in the sense that God could not allow it done by humans meaning by God’s judgment, homosexuality was wrong.
Pasto Siele also stated that everybody in the listed sins was welcomed to church so Jesus may transform them. He added that they were not looking down on anybody but were simply saying they understood homosexuality as a sexual desire. He added that Jesus was the solution.
For his part, Thebe Ramokhuwa who is an attorney at AT-Law said the nation could not sit down and allow the Parliament to amend the law of that nature. He added that in a democratic country like this one, the community could not allow such law to be amended without their input. He said Batswana more especially the Christian community was against that enactment. On Saturday, the Evangelical Fellowship of Botswana will be hosting a march from Blue Tree to Parliament Grounds campaigning against the bill.