Then-Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, speaking before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in Washington on April 22, 2009. Also pictured are commissioner Nina Shea, left, and Michael Cromartie, vice chair of the commission (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Then-Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, speaking before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in Washington on April 22, 2009. Also pictured are commissioner Nina Shea, left, and Michael Cromartie, vice chair of the commission (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

African Christians reject US President Obama’s attempts during his July visit to Kenya to “push that which is against our faith and culture…”

Cardinal John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja in Nigeria, said in a July 26 interview with News Agency of Nigeria that the position of the Church in Nigeria against homosexuality is “irrevocable.”

According to him, the Catholic Church will continue to sustain its stand against gay marriage.

He regretted that many people across the world are accepting homosexuality as a norm, but insisted that it could never become a norm just because it is accepted by some.

“Unfortunately, we are living in a world where these things have now become quite acceptable, but the fact that they are acceptable doesn’t mean that they are right,” Cardinal Onaiyekan said. “The Catholic Church considers itself as carrying the banner of the truth in the world that has allowed itself to be so badly deceived.”

The cardinal said the Catholic Church is one of the few religious groups across the world that has maintained its consistency against abnormal sexual practice, which he described as against the will of God.

“Even if people don’t like us for it, our Church has always said homosexuality is unnatural and marriage is between a man and a woman,” he said. “There is no such thing as marriage between two men or marriage between two women; whatever they do among themselves should not be called marriage.

“There is no question of the Catholic Church changing its positions on this matter,” he stressed.

In related news, during a July visit to Africa, US President Barack Obama condemned Kenya’s outlawing of homosexual acts as “wrong — full stop,” comparing Kenya’s policy toward gays to the treatment of blacks in the United States prior to the civil rights movement.

“As an African American in the United States, I am painfully aware of what happens when people are treated differently under the law,” the US President said.

But many blacks in the United States have consistently rejected the President’s parallel of gay marriage to the civil rights movement, and called the comparison offensive.

“President Obama is a disgrace to the black community,” Rev. William Owens of the Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) told Breitbart News. “He is rewriting history. We didn’t suffer and die for gay marriage. We marched for opportunity, equality, justice, freedom from oppression. We are the true heirs of the civil rights movement. We have a new movement to reclaim the ‘real’ civil rights movement.”

In May, Bishop Emmanuel Badejo of Oyo, Nigeria, said that Africa’s position on homosexuality had proved an obstacle to American assistance in fighting Boko Haram. He said the US had made clear it would not help Nigeria fight Boko Haram unless the country modified its laws regarding homosexuality, family planning and birth-control.

Charles Gabriel Palmer Buckle, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Accra, Ghana, also weighed in on the President’s words in July, noting that the Catholic Church is against homosexual practice as contrary to the law of God, and that homosexuality is “anti-human.”

“The Church cannot but uphold the fundamental truth about marriage and family life and within the role of sex and sexuality in the whole of the human and social ecology,” he said.

Prior to President Obama’s visit, 700 Kenyan evangelical pastors wrote an open letter asking the president not to come to their country to push the gay agenda.

Mark Kariuki, the leader of an alliance representing 38,000 churches and 10 million Kenyan Christians, was the main drafter of the letter.

“We do not want him to come and talk on homosexuality in Kenya or push us to accepting that which is against our faith and culture,” Kariuki said.

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