The 14 years for ‘engaging in homosexual relationship’ is even more bizarre, if one is talking about consenting adults. The talk is not about having sex or displaying affection in public, which might at least make some sense as they might offend the social, religious or moral sensibilities of others. How does a relationship, conducted in private by consenting adults, become such a major criminal offence, that the enforcement of the law raises the spectre of law officers knocking on the doors of citizen’s apartments and dragging hapless adults minding their business off to jail, through a ‘guard of honour’ formed by jeering neighbours who must have informed on them, perhaps after spying through the keyhole.

What about 14 years for ‘joining a homosexual organisation’? Whatever happened to the freedom of association? One is not talking about an organisation that is plotting secession of part of Nigeria, or planning the assassination of government leaders!

On the other hand, the prevalent logic in the countries which are most disdainful of the African attitude, while obviously smug and self-satisfied, is not as unassailable as most people in those societies would like to think. The homosexuals’ struggle for ‘equal rights’ has been likened in Western society to the Civil Rights movement – the struggle for emancipation and equality by an oppressed minority of black people in America. The comparison in a way diminishes the black struggle, but also unfairly invests the homosexual struggle with a ‘political correctness’, since any apparent opposition to it would be tantamount to being ‘racist’.

The protagonists of the pro-homosexual argument also give the impression that all issues pertaining to the subject are settled, all implications have been thought through, all possibility of potential harm to human society now or in the future has been eliminated, and anyone who is not signing on is uncivilised and simply does not get it. Many people have specifically remarked that the draconian Ugandan and Nigerian laws are evidence of present-day backwardness that will improve over time as the nations, and the whole of African society, become more ‘civilised’.

But some issues would simply not agree to go away. Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that the ‘personal freedom’ guaranteed to the individual in the Open Society makes it difficult to find any justification for criminalising any relationship that is voluntarily entered into by two consenting adults, when they are not, through it, directly infringing on the rights of other people.

This is the ‘basic’ aspect of the ‘right’.

The logic would have been hard to assail if it stopped at that.

The truth is that it does not.

There are ‘extensions’ to the liberty which need to be weighed one by one, instead of being shoved into the basket in a frantic rush to be ‘liberal’ and ‘correct’. The assumptions, which have been followed by the herd, include the notion that a man and a man (and a woman and a woman) should be able to ‘marry’, both in civil and religious union.

The marriage should be recognised by the law, and the ‘couple’ given the same rights before the law as any other legally married couple, including the rights to property and benefits.

They include the right of homosexual couples to adopt and foster children, and bring them up as ‘family’.