The Foreign Office has issued an alert. Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ+ bill, they warn, threatens Commonwealth values. How quaint.
How predictable. Once again, the old imperial centre lectures its former colonies on the proper way to commit societal suicide. The bill, which criminalises LGBTQ+ advocacy and even the mere identification as queer, is of course a travesty of liberal principles.
But let us not pretend that London’s sudden moral outrage is anything but a thin veneer for geopolitical posturing. The Commonwealth is not a family. It is a relic.
And relics do not dictate values. Ghana, like many African nations, is wrestling with the collision of traditional norms and the postmodern West’s relentless export of sexual emancipation. The Foreign Office’s alarm is less about human rights than about maintaining the fiction of a global liberal order.
Rome fell. So too will this brittle consensus. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood the importance of national distinctiveness.
They did not force suttee on the British, nor should we force gender theory on Ghana. Let the Commonwealth fracture. Let Ghana choose its own path, even if that path is narrow and cruel.
The alternative is a homogenised world where every culture is a pale imitation of the BBC’s moral universe. And that, dear reader, is a future not worth defending.
