It feels really empowering for me to meet other LGBT people of faith, and see the network growing. Personally, I do think a lot about visibility, and I hope by being out and proud I can help create safe and positive spaces for other trans and non-binary people of faith and none.
There are still a lot of misconceptions both about 'being LGBT' and 'Jewish', so it may not be an easy road if you come from a more conservative Jewish community, but it is possible.
In almost every country, there are LGBT-inclusive synagogues and support groups. You can find their contact details online. Make sure you keep safe and have a support network when you come out. Be mindful who you confide in and take it one step at a time. It is your choice how public you want to go, always check with yourself that you feel comfortable with the next move.
The most important thing is that you can be who you are. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Recommended Meet the year-old with cancer who launched a gay magazine. Tamoor Ali is years-old. He is a corporate finance manager in the oil and gas industry based in London. Recommended Woman who runs London's oldest trans club hits back at Jenni Murray.
Abbey Thornton is years-old. She is from Buckinghamshire and is a Sociology student at the University of Bath. Recommended What it was like to grow up gay in s London. Recommended The terrifying experiences of a gay man who lived through AIDs crisis. Luke Dowding is years-old. He is from Seaford and works in administration and business management.
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Already subscribed? Log in. But we really have to understand that the majority of world religions — not just radicalized Islamic belief but Christianity as well, and Christianity that's maybe not even radicalized — preach anti-LGBT theology that is insidious in the way it manifests itself.
So Christians may not be throwing us off buildings. They may not be shooting us. But their theology is leading us to want to kill ourselves. Their theology encourages us to pray to a god to take our queerness away.
It leads to deaths in many other ways. So not only is religion at the root of the legislative attacks in wanting to deny us protections, deny us equal rights, deny us our humanity in using restrooms, it is also, when preached in our churches and from our pulpits, deadly. VM: Based on what you just said, how do LGBT people of faith reconcile their faith when people use their faith against them? I have only gone to Seventh-Day Adventist schools my entire life. And I say this because I am deeply entrenched in Christianity.
I am still a Christian. I work in these spaces because I believe it's what God is calling me to do, and I believe our church is promoting something to our community that is anti-Gospel, and that we need to repent and do better.
A lot of people, because of my queerness, want to dismiss my Christianity, but they have no say in doing that. In terms of reconciling my faith and sexuality, I recognize that I can have a faith that is independent from even any organized religion. I was very upset in my teen years, for a very long time, with God, mainly because of what church individuals had done to me.
But I recognized in my own faith and relationship with God that the things I was hearing from the pulpit and some of the things I was hearing from church members weren't how God saw me.
I saw that God gave me my sexuality. I saw that when I prayed for God to change me, it wasn't happening, and it wasn't happening because God said, "You don't need to be changed.
So all these things led me to recognize that I'm able to be a Christian. I'm able to have faith independent of what any preacher or evangelical leader may say. And I think that's how a lot of us reconcile our faith and sexuality. We believe that despite being told by fellow believers that we're not allowed to believe, or that the Gospel is not ours, for me it's my birthright as a queer child of God.
My faith is my birthright, and you're not able to take that away from me. VM: And beyond the legal attack, how do people use religious texts to discriminate? EC: It's ridiculous how individuals are using very limited text , like six verses, to justify the dehumanization of an entire group of individuals. There are many more verses that support slavery and really awful types of marriages. We're still trying to have a remedial understanding in our theology on what is really said in certain text about same-sex sex.
Now, in recent years, quite a few theologians and scholars have been published in mainstream spaces that have affirming theology.
And quite a few evangelical leaders and authors, straight individuals, have announced that they are affirming of LGBT relationships in the church and reexamining the scriptures. And when we want to ask someone about gay people, we go to the devout atheist gay activist. These individuals don't get the airtime because the evangelical right dismisses them as soon as they say they are affirming, but there's a growing number of individuals who are saying, "Actually, we looked at the text, and we believe God called us to interpret it this way.
And that'll continue to happen. And it'll happen in a much larger and systemic fashion. Is Qantas wrongfully wielding its financial power to coerce Rugby Australia?
I have already outlined how some limitations on freedom of expression can be justified on these grounds. So is there any problem here? Well we may wonder about the intentions of Qantas, what if their actions were purely motivated by profit and not at all by concerns for liberal democracy and the moral status of minorities?
Qatar imprisons those deemed guilty of homosexual acts, and the UAE punishes homosexuality with the death penalty. If corporate entities like Qantas are purely interested in money, then occasionally they might coincidentally act in ways that are morally good but more often than not they will act in ways that promote the interests of a relatively small group of shareholders at the expense of the public.
For this reason, we need ways of regulating corporations. The silent premise is: the particular way in which Folau spoke of homosexuality i. This particular way of speaking ascribes blameworthiness to a certain kind of sexual orientation, which is quite different from ascribing blameworthiness to a certain kind of act cf.
Considered as a whole, the speech act conveys that proposition in way that legitimizes adopting an attitude likely harmful to homosexuals. This is what makes the speech act morally problematic. For that is too strong a requirement, which may be met only in extreme cases i. This is a good discussion. Hostility certainly seems to be appropriate when we are trying to pin down that counts as hate speech.
Just as an aside, what about discriminatory speech that is not hostile as such but just dismissive of others counting as moral equals… E. Anyway, back to the moral status discussion. Another way of thinking about this is to compare the thief to the homosexual.
I agree that in fact the thief is be default treated as a moral equal, this is the basis of blaming him, we show that we think he is capable of meeting the shared moral standards. The result, I believe, accommodates your example, entails the result I was after in my previous comment, and is still free of the problem I pointed out , i. In my view,. I think this is important to explain the possibility in being X-ist while considering the Xs are moral peers.
An example would be to always favour members of your family over other individuals when given the choice to rescue at most one of two people, with one relative and one stranger. The border between these two normative categories is thin, I admit. In such a situation, you might feel compelled to be hostile to the person constituting the perceived danger even though you do consider that person as morally requiring to be given the same moral due.
A few caveats: I am an amateur follower of this blog. For the record, I was raised by an atheist father and a lapsed Jewish mother.
Also, although I am now married with children, I previously enjoyed same-sex relationships. Is homosexuality wrong? Personally and theoretically, I concur entirely with McConnell here: it is not. Indeed, it is arguably beneficial. Does religious expression carry an a priori normative force for those outside the religion?
I argue that it does not, for the simple reason that, if one is outside of a religion — and in this increasingly secular age that is a growing majority of the population — then arguments based on religious texts or religious reasoning carry no validity. Indeed, those outside the religion tend simply mock religious beliefs, then ignore them. Well, I write this from room at Yale University where I have just spent the past weekend at a series of events overshadowed by the question of the future of Ethnicity, Race and Migration studies at the university.
I can assure you that the definition of stronger and weaker groups is shifting — has shifted — rapidly. Previous minorities are quickly becoming the majorities. These activists received moral, pastoral and financial support from the US-based organisation, The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries.
What is particularly interesting is not only the pan-African ideology underlying this initiative, but also the way in which it is framed explicitly as a progressive black Christian attempt to combat the influence of American white evangelical Christianity.
This puts both race and sexuality at the heart of a contest for the future of Christianity in Africa. This trope suggests that just like the early Christian church two thousand years ago, this small LGBT affirming church community is currently figuring out its identity and mission which will be decisive for nothing less than the nature and future of Christianity in Kenya and in Africa at large.
Whilst this framing might seem pretentious, or at least ambitious, the church in Nairobi does play a crucial role for community members, including a group of Ugandan LGBT refugees who had to leave their home country due to ostracism but who continue to experience marginalisation and harassment in Kenya.
Through prayer and preaching, worship and pastoral support, but also through sport and recreation activities as well as advocacy and community activism, the church provides an important social and spiritual home for its congregants.
Similar initiatives have mushroomed in other African countries in recent years, representing a nascent African Christian LGBT movement.
A case in point is the Same Love music video , released by Kenyan musicians and activists in February and soon thereafter banned by the Kenyan authorities. On the other hand, and perhaps more significant, the video appeals to religion in positive ways.
This clearly demonstrates that the Bible and the Christian faith are not only sites of struggle where the debate on homosexuality is being fought by homophobic African religious and political leaders, but that the same sites are appropriated by African LGBT activists in support of their cause. The longer term impact of these various ways in which Christianity is reclaimed to support LGBT identity, community and activism in Africa is still to be seen.
Yet these examples do illustrate the need to move beyond a narrow focus on African religious homophobia, and to attend to the multiple and complex roles that religion plays in contemporary dynamics of African sexualities. His research focuses on issues of religion, gender and sexuality in Africa.
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