By Tim Trent (Dartmouth, England) MAR 7 | Today's section of the Gay Liberation Front 1971 Manifesto deals with the church. To be fair this is going to be hard to write without just being a load of links to good things and a load of links to bad things. First we'll look, verbatim, at the manifesto:
CHURCH
Formal religious education is still part of everyone's schooling, and our whole legal structure is supposedly based on Christianity whose archaic and irrational teachings support the family and marriage as the only permitted condition for sex. Gay people have been attacked as abominable and sinful since the beginning of both Judaism and Christianity, and even if today the Church is playing down these strictures on homosexuality, its new ideology is that gay people are pathetic objects for sympathy.
Now I'm not at all sure what the status of religious education is in the USA. I hope very much that while there is a separation there of church and state, unlike the UK where the state and church are intertwined, that US and UK and other children alike all learn about religion today in an objective manner. What I hope does not happen is that a particular creed is drummed into children. But that is a whole different discussion.
The manifesto missed a large part of the church and its involvement by digressing into schooling and education. That's a pity. It weakens it where strength was required. It's possible to speculate that this may have been to try not to offend the clergy.
In 1971 the main religion in the UK was some form of Christianity. Judaism was recognised as a minor religion, Islam and other religions had next to no influence here. In the USA the religious base was some sort of Anglican derived Christianity. In neither nation was religion equated with power. Israel is interesting. I am no expert, but I know it is a Jewish state in every sense of the word, and that the Jewish ethnicity and the religion are intertwined in daily life, not simply in worship.
No religion approved of homosexuality. No religion tolerated sexual relations between same sex partners. In 2011 that is somewhat different, but by no means universally different. And there is a new player in the west, Islam. Normal population migration has created substantial Islamic influence in every western nation. This is not a new thing. Spain was, in its history, a substantially Moorish and Islamic nation, for example. Times change and people and their religions move with the times.
As time has passed simple things have happened to Christianity and Judaism. This has appeared to be less prevalent in Islam, a religion that appears to the outsider to be less tolerant of differences than even fundamentalist Judaism or Christianity. Those simple things are that the LGBT clergy have started to let it be known that they are Lesbians, Gay, Bisexual or Trans and they are still functionally the same people, still ordained, still clergy. They just happen to be LGBT.
Positive aspects include such things as papers by scholars on the supposed Leviticus prohibitions. I have the privilege to be counted as a friend by Rabbi Simchah Roth, author of the quietly influential paper 'Dear David' with the subtitle of 'Homosexual Relationships - A Halakhic Investigation'. A modest man, he will not tell you how this paper was authoritative recently in causing the Conservative Jews to decide ordain openly gay Rabbis. Nor will he tell you of his work with Rabbi Menachem Creditor in setting up Keshet Rabbis, which, as Wikipedia tells us:
Keshet-Rabbis is an organization of Conservative/Masorti rabbis which holds that LGBT Jews should be embraced as full, open members of all Conservative/Masorti congregations and institutions. Based on its understanding of Jewish sources and Jewish values, it asserts that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews may fully participate in community life and achieve positions of professional and lay leadership.
Judaism is moving ahead.
Anglican based religions are divided. But even Canterbury has moved now to espouse LGBT clergy. The USA has unfortunate areas of fundamentalism which have a selective interpretation of the bible, and they justify the oppression of gay people. Start 30 seconds in to the clip:
This is a current example. There are many, many such examples. It would be overkill to list them.
Roman Catholicism is wholly against homosexuality. This comes from the top. There has ben no change since 1971, nor is one expected. Yet there are a huge number of LGBT Roman Catholics who are devout. The faith is a paradox.
Islam is also unequivocal. It was insignificant in the UK in 1971. In 2011 it has a large part to play in our society. There are constant discussions about whether that is a good thing or not, and those are outside the scope of this article. Islam's intransigence towards homosexuality is expressed by this headline and article:
Islamists in East London have sparked anger after flyposting stickers which called for a gay-free zone.The stickers were distributed around the Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Poplar areas over the weekend. Specifically, they were targeted at schools and pubs, including the gay-friendly George and Dragon.The professionally produced, anonymous stickers say: “Arise and Warn. Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment.”The 'Gay free zone' slogan is within a diagonal bar across a rainbow flag.
As one can see, the attitudes are unambiguous. I've included them under the heading of Church despite their being insignificant in 1971 because they have arrived on the scene significantly and relatively recently.
We have made some forward progress. I've looked at the religions I have a nodding familiarity with in the situations where I understand them at all. I'm wholly incompetent to look at the non Abrahamic religions, and I am certainly not going into any religion at sect level, this article is a helicopter view.
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