CRIMINAL SANCTIONS FOR SAME-SEX MARRIAGE IN NIGERIA: AN APPRAISAL OF ANCIENT AND MODERN PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

There is no doubt that the criminal law is vitally important to preserve public order and decency, and to protect citizens from offensive and injurious acts. It is thus, addressed to all classes of society as the rules they are bound to obey on pain of punishment. Indeed, as far as protection against crime is concerned, every person in the society is each other’s keeper. The critical question however, appears to be, to what extent the criminal law and criminal sanctions can be employed to interfere in the private lives of citizens or seek to enforce particular patterns of conduct? This raises the vexed issue of imposing crass morality on strict legality. Disposition of consenting adults to sexual behaviours is one of such existential realities confronting society. Should the emergent ‘modern’ sensation of same sex marriages and civil unions be a matter of individual, choice? If so, should such practices be prohibited and visited with criminal sanctions? Should certain ‘ancient’, yet organic customs that throw up incidents of the so called ‘woman to woman’ marriage be equated with same sex marriages and be similarly punished? The paper advocates a proper understanding of underlying philosophical ontology of native peoples and their custom to avoid the pitfall of hasty, over generalization by placing the ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ in proper perspectives.