BC's hate crime protocol is completed and online in a clearer form--before, policies were in existence but they are no more readily available. While not online yet, it should be posted by the end of the semester. Also in the works is an online 'hate incident' reporting database so that administrators can keep track of the problems on campus and try to take action based on them. The diversity policy will be found here: http://www.bc.edu/offices/diversity/
Read on to find out more about the policies at BC...
Hate-crime protocol completed
By: Pilar Landon
Posted: 11/19/07
The University has announced the completion of a new hate-crime and bias-motivated, offensive-conduct protocol, the product of student initiative and hours of work by many University offices. The protocol, which is currently undergoing minor revisions by the Office of Institutional Diversity (OID), will launch online before the semester's end.
Spurred by the racially charged incidents last October, students formed a unified movement called TRUTH and advocated before the administration for a well-defined and codified protocol. In response to student requests, a committee to develop such a protocol was formed and met throughout the fall and spring semesters.
"The result is a tribute to the students who became involved and spoke up," said Interim Dean for Student Development Paul Chebator.
The committee, which also met briefly this fall, was co-chaired by Acting Vice President for Student Affairs Sheilah Horton and Richard Jefferson, executive director for institutional diversity. Students comprised a significant contingency on the committee, drawing upon leaders from the TRUTH movement, the AHANA Leadership Council (ALC), the GLBTQ Leadership Council, and the Undergraduate Government of Boston College (UGBC) for input. It also included a diverse representation of faculty, and staff members - Boston College Police Department Police Chief Robert Morse; Henry Humphreys, director of Residential Life; and Ines Maturana Sendoya, director of AHANA Student Programs, to name a few.
"Students called for the University to develop a hate-crime protocol because they felt students didn't know where to report these incidents and that the procedure was unclear," Horton said. "The goal of the committee was to review processes that BC had in place to deal with hateful incidents and crimes."
Research by the committee showed that other universities had online links that explained their protocols - something that BC did not. Committee members then looked at these protocols at other universities and how they might be applied to the BC community, Chebator said.
"There were protocols already in place [at BC]," Chebator said, "so it was a matter of putting it into one document and making it transparent." The policy unites all processes and procedures from different University offices under one umbrella. "It puts a front end on all procedures," Chebator said. "It's a clear public statement on what will and will not be tolerated."
Considerable debate was spent over what title the protocol would give to hateful incidents that did not rise to the level of a crime. To be considered a "hate crime," the incident has to be a crime in its own right while also including an element of discrimination based on gender, race, sexual orientation, or disability. "But just because it is not criminal doesn't mean the University will tolerate it," Chebator said.
Horton said the committee decided on "bias-motivated offensive conduct" as the appropriate nomenclature for such incidents. "It describes something not criminal but still in violation of University standards of conduct," she said.
The protocol includes definitions for what constitutes a hate crime and a bias-motivated offensive conduct, what targets and witnesses of hate crimes should do, specific responses by University offices in dealing with such incidents, and resources for education and prevention.
"There are multiply entry points into this system," Chebator said. "There is no one person to report incidents to." Per the new protocol, ODSD, ResLife, and BCPD are all equipped to handle hate crimes and bias-motivated offensive conduct.
Another task set before the committee was the development of a database, which is still in the works pending technological logistics. The database will record incidents as they happen, and any member of the community can report incidents to the database.
"This will create an institutional memory, as it will be reported on a regular basis to the University community and will allow for much more transparency," Chebator said. Currently, the University releases a record of all crimes occurring on campus, as federal policy stipulates - this new system will report non-criminal incidents as well as hate crimes.
While University officials and students on the committee said the completion of the protocol represents a significant improvement for the community, it will take incidents to actually go through the new system to determine the level of success. Depending on feedback from people who use the new protocol and database, the document may need to be changed to increase its efficacy.
Rajwantie Sahai, ALC co-president and A&S '08, said the completed protocol is a step in the right direction. "It has been on the student agenda for a while, and having it available to the community will definitely create more awareness," she said. "It is as much a set of guidelines for conduct as it is a symbol of BC's being a safe place - it helps knowing you can speak up and defend yourself, that you are protected by the University."
The new protocol, she said, creates a measure by which to hold people accountable. "Before, the absence of a protocol silenced people from determining what behavior would not be tolerated. There was no way to address people being targeted and what they could do to change that."
Sahai hopes that the new protocol continues to undergo changes as the community responds to it. The resources listed by the protocol, for instance, are extensive for the AHANA community and for women, she said, but lacking for the GLBTQ community. "I hope students beyond those who are involved with the committee will ask for more resources and reach out to the administration themselves."
Jenniffer Castillo, UGBC president and A&S '08, was also a member of the committee. "The committee itself was a success from the standpoint that it accomplished its goal," she said. "It ties in a number of departments and resources and makes it the role of the University to make sure they follow it."
Castillo said that despite this success, more can still be done though to address concerns that might arise. "We need to make sure that we not only have a protocol but that we use it and follow it," she said. "We also need to draw a line with communication: When do we alert the entire community and when does confidentiality need to take precedence?"
Sahai said the protocol also leaves a lot to be decided in terms of how the perpetrators and victims will be treated after the incidents are processed. "Will both victims and perpetrators need to attend counseling?" she posed. "Typically only the victims receive counseling, but shouldn't the perpetrators be made to address their own issues?"
Although the protocol is by and large a reaction to the events of last fall, it can also be seen as having preventative and proactive aspects that Castillo hopes the University and students will take seriously. "We hope the release of the protocol will spark communication among faculty and students as well as the creation of preventative programs," she said.
UGBC, for example, is planning something similar to last fall's UNITY week, which culminated in a rally where hundreds of students pledged to combat discrimination. "It will focus on getting students together and talking about what we don't tolerate - with the commitment of the students, it could become an annual event," Castillo said.
"It's an entire BC community issue," Sahai said. "Students need to understand that hate crimes or incidents won't be tolerated or taken lightly."
She quoted Kalamu Ya Salaam, a New Orleans, La.-based poet who recently spoke at BC: "'The ability to respond to your environment is a sign of humanity - the inability to respond is a sign of oppression.' This protocol allows us to express ourselves in a way that counteracts this oppression. It gives us the power to respond in such a way that the school takes note and responds."
Monday, November 19, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Front page Heights article! (Catholicism and Sexuality event)
The Heights writes about the event held last Thursday, titled "Learning to Teach: The Challenge of Catholic Sexual Ethics" led by Fr. Ken Himes. Held in the Gasson Honors Library, it had a great turn out with lots of challenging questions addressed. It was a very positive event and left a lot of questions to be pondered and explored. Read on, friends..
Exploring sexuality in the Catholic context
By: Kelly McCartney
Posted: 11/12/07
The Rev. Ken Himes, O.F.M., chair of the theology department, braved a cold night and a recently diagnosed case of Walking Pneumonia to speak to a packed house at Boston College on "Learning to Teach: The Challenge of Catholic Sexual Ethics." The event, co-sponsored by the Gay Leadership Council (GLC) and the theology department, was held in the Honors Library this past Wednesday night.
The conversation-style presentation covered topics as varied as the changing demographics of the church, celibacy, and the questions of homosexuality in the church. Himes opened the night by emphasizing his lack of academic experience on the topic of Catholic sexual ethics.
"I'm not here to talk to you as head of the theology department and the reason for this is in all of my years of teaching, I have never taught a course on sexual ethics," Himes said. "I don't claim any great academic expertise on sexual ethics."
Instead, Himes said, his background in sexual ethics consists of the many conversations about the topic that he had participated in over the years.
After his academic disclaimer, Himes launched into a history of Pope Paul VI's encyclical, or letter to all the churches, titled "Humanae Vitae." The encyclical, published in July 1968, reaffirmed the church's ban on all types of artificial contraception and expanded the ban to include the recently developed oral contraceptive, or birth control pill. This ban has shaped the Catholic Church's position on contraceptives for nearly 50 years.
Such a ban has clear ramifications on Catholic colleges like BC. Because of "Humanae Vitae," none of the health centers on the BC campus are allowed to offer any form of contraceptive or any type of counseling that suggests the use of contraceptives.
This is in large part responsible for BC's failing grade on a national college sexual health report card, sponsored by Trojan condoms. As previously reported by The Heights, BC scored a 1.91 out of 4.0, putting the school at 120th place out of 139 schools.
"Humanae Vitae's" influence went beyond just a ban on contraceptives to also affect the kind of conversations that Catholics had about sexual ethics.
"In many ways, much of the conversation about sexual ethics in Roman Catholicism is a just piece of the puzzle," Himes said, "and often lurking beneath the water, is a larger or different question about the authority of the church to teach: who can teach and how teaching should be thought about in the church."
The style of teaching should have changed dramatically, Himes said, as the demographics of the Catholic Church changed. He used the example of his father and his sister to illustrate the changing face of Roman Catholicism.
His father, Himes said, was a blue-collar man who was used to taking orders, not giving them. Himes' sister, on the other hand, is an executive in charge of hundreds of people.
Himes used the microcosm of his own family to illustrate the larger changes going on in Roman Catholicism. Catholics today are more likely to be white-collar workers in leadership positions than their counterparts of 50 years ago. Such a change in demographics was never really matched by a change in teaching style within the church, Himes said.
"The crisis of authority [within the church] was going to happen because the demographics were changing," Himes said. "And because the audience has changed, you can't teach the same way."
Himes noted that the change in demographics also illustrated a change in style of thought. Where American Catholics of other times would hear the word of the church and accept it as is, Catholics today are much more likely to question the church's views and positions.
Such questions, Himes noted, should be answered and discussed. In his opinion, the church's reaction to questions is often to repeat itself, only louder, or to just throw the questioner out of the theoretical room, a reaction that Himes believes is the wrong one.
"The good teacher sees that the questioner is not being defiant by asking questions," Himes said. "The good teacher says 'Here's an opportunity for me to teach better.'"
As far as the answers to the big questions on sexual ethics, Himes said that he believed that the Catholic Church had the answer to the big question right, but the answer to many others "less than right."
"Sex matters, and if you get it wrong, you screw up your own life and the lives of other people," Himes said. "It really does have an impact on your happiness, your grasp of yourself, and your ability to form healthy relationships. The church is absolutely right to say sex is important.
"Does all sex before marriage just count as premarital? Is everyone with a homosexual orientation morally disordered?" Himes said. "On all of those questions, I think the church needs to rethink and have some conversations."
Conversation is exactly what Wednesday night's event was about. The event was the joint brainchild of Amy Kyleen Lute, an organizer of the event and A&S '09, and Celso Perez, GLC president and A&S '09.
"We thought there was a need on campus to talk about Catholic sexual ethics and really to engage those questions," Perez said. "Like Father Himes said, not to be passive, obedient, not simply affirm what the teaching is but to actually engage it."
The event was the first in a series that will cover various questions of sexual ethics within the church. There will be two or more each semester, each focusing on various controversial topics of sexual ethics within the church.
Faith was another important component of the discussion. Lute and Perez, both committed Catholics, believe that the conversations should serve to ask tough questions and find answers that give attendees a broader sense of their beliefs.
"I think being Catholic is about making your faith your own and if that means challenging what you're told in order to integrate it with your experience, then that's a necessary step to really truly believing the Word," Lute said.
Father Himes finished his speech with an appeal to the students at the event.
"A place like BC should be one where young committed people can talk to each other and create zones of freedom where they can talk freely," Himes said. "If we can't do it at a place like here, then where the hell can we do it?"
Judging by the amount of attendees at last Wednesday's event, it's a conversation that many BC students are ready to have.
www.bcheights.com
Exploring sexuality in the Catholic context
By: Kelly McCartney
Posted: 11/12/07
The Rev. Ken Himes, O.F.M., chair of the theology department, braved a cold night and a recently diagnosed case of Walking Pneumonia to speak to a packed house at Boston College on "Learning to Teach: The Challenge of Catholic Sexual Ethics." The event, co-sponsored by the Gay Leadership Council (GLC) and the theology department, was held in the Honors Library this past Wednesday night.
The conversation-style presentation covered topics as varied as the changing demographics of the church, celibacy, and the questions of homosexuality in the church. Himes opened the night by emphasizing his lack of academic experience on the topic of Catholic sexual ethics.
"I'm not here to talk to you as head of the theology department and the reason for this is in all of my years of teaching, I have never taught a course on sexual ethics," Himes said. "I don't claim any great academic expertise on sexual ethics."
Instead, Himes said, his background in sexual ethics consists of the many conversations about the topic that he had participated in over the years.
After his academic disclaimer, Himes launched into a history of Pope Paul VI's encyclical, or letter to all the churches, titled "Humanae Vitae." The encyclical, published in July 1968, reaffirmed the church's ban on all types of artificial contraception and expanded the ban to include the recently developed oral contraceptive, or birth control pill. This ban has shaped the Catholic Church's position on contraceptives for nearly 50 years.
Such a ban has clear ramifications on Catholic colleges like BC. Because of "Humanae Vitae," none of the health centers on the BC campus are allowed to offer any form of contraceptive or any type of counseling that suggests the use of contraceptives.
This is in large part responsible for BC's failing grade on a national college sexual health report card, sponsored by Trojan condoms. As previously reported by The Heights, BC scored a 1.91 out of 4.0, putting the school at 120th place out of 139 schools.
"Humanae Vitae's" influence went beyond just a ban on contraceptives to also affect the kind of conversations that Catholics had about sexual ethics.
"In many ways, much of the conversation about sexual ethics in Roman Catholicism is a just piece of the puzzle," Himes said, "and often lurking beneath the water, is a larger or different question about the authority of the church to teach: who can teach and how teaching should be thought about in the church."
The style of teaching should have changed dramatically, Himes said, as the demographics of the Catholic Church changed. He used the example of his father and his sister to illustrate the changing face of Roman Catholicism.
His father, Himes said, was a blue-collar man who was used to taking orders, not giving them. Himes' sister, on the other hand, is an executive in charge of hundreds of people.
Himes used the microcosm of his own family to illustrate the larger changes going on in Roman Catholicism. Catholics today are more likely to be white-collar workers in leadership positions than their counterparts of 50 years ago. Such a change in demographics was never really matched by a change in teaching style within the church, Himes said.
"The crisis of authority [within the church] was going to happen because the demographics were changing," Himes said. "And because the audience has changed, you can't teach the same way."
Himes noted that the change in demographics also illustrated a change in style of thought. Where American Catholics of other times would hear the word of the church and accept it as is, Catholics today are much more likely to question the church's views and positions.
Such questions, Himes noted, should be answered and discussed. In his opinion, the church's reaction to questions is often to repeat itself, only louder, or to just throw the questioner out of the theoretical room, a reaction that Himes believes is the wrong one.
"The good teacher sees that the questioner is not being defiant by asking questions," Himes said. "The good teacher says 'Here's an opportunity for me to teach better.'"
As far as the answers to the big questions on sexual ethics, Himes said that he believed that the Catholic Church had the answer to the big question right, but the answer to many others "less than right."
"Sex matters, and if you get it wrong, you screw up your own life and the lives of other people," Himes said. "It really does have an impact on your happiness, your grasp of yourself, and your ability to form healthy relationships. The church is absolutely right to say sex is important.
"Does all sex before marriage just count as premarital? Is everyone with a homosexual orientation morally disordered?" Himes said. "On all of those questions, I think the church needs to rethink and have some conversations."
Conversation is exactly what Wednesday night's event was about. The event was the joint brainchild of Amy Kyleen Lute, an organizer of the event and A&S '09, and Celso Perez, GLC president and A&S '09.
"We thought there was a need on campus to talk about Catholic sexual ethics and really to engage those questions," Perez said. "Like Father Himes said, not to be passive, obedient, not simply affirm what the teaching is but to actually engage it."
The event was the first in a series that will cover various questions of sexual ethics within the church. There will be two or more each semester, each focusing on various controversial topics of sexual ethics within the church.
Faith was another important component of the discussion. Lute and Perez, both committed Catholics, believe that the conversations should serve to ask tough questions and find answers that give attendees a broader sense of their beliefs.
"I think being Catholic is about making your faith your own and if that means challenging what you're told in order to integrate it with your experience, then that's a necessary step to really truly believing the Word," Lute said.
Father Himes finished his speech with an appeal to the students at the event.
"A place like BC should be one where young committed people can talk to each other and create zones of freedom where they can talk freely," Himes said. "If we can't do it at a place like here, then where the hell can we do it?"
Judging by the amount of attendees at last Wednesday's event, it's a conversation that many BC students are ready to have.
www.bcheights.com
Sunday, November 11, 2007
NY Times article--Gay Muslims in the U.S.
Written last week for the New York Times, Neil Macfarquhar speaks about and interviews religious Muslims who are Gay in the U.S., and how they are struggling to deal with these two identities.
November 7, 2007
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR
SAN FRANCISCO — About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.
While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.
Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.
“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”
For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn homosexuality is gaining momentum.
In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more protected.
As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say, partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such research.
Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington failed largely out of fear, he said.
“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.
Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.
Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an abomination is remains open to interpretation.”
Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination, said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he said.
The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because sex was defined as penetration.
Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he said condemned homosexuals.
“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they had a virus.”
All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ. “Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does it? Not me or you, only by law.”
Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it given practices like open gym showers.
The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.
Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European colonialism.
“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist. “They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it helped me reconcile the two.”
Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.
Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him. He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.
He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”
A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too depressing.
But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat. “They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.
The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/us/07gaymuslim.html?_r=1
November 7, 2007
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR
SAN FRANCISCO — About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.
While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.
Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.
“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”
For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn homosexuality is gaining momentum.
In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more protected.
As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say, partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such research.
Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington failed largely out of fear, he said.
“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.
Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.
Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an abomination is remains open to interpretation.”
Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination, said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he said.
The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because sex was defined as penetration.
Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he said condemned homosexuals.
“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they had a virus.”
All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ. “Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does it? Not me or you, only by law.”
Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it given practices like open gym showers.
The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.
Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European colonialism.
“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist. “They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it helped me reconcile the two.”
Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.
Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him. He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.
He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”
A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too depressing.
But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat. “They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.
The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/us/07gaymuslim.html?_r=1
Gays and Grays--Nov 15th 7pm Higgins 310
Sponsored by the Lesbian Gay Faculty Staff and Administrator Association (LGFSAA) at BC:
This Thursday! Author Fr. Donal Godfrey comes to speak about his experience and book about working with a Catholic parish in the Castro in San Francisco that is inclusive of the gay community.
Gays and Grays: The Story of the Gay Community at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Parish in San Francisco
Thursday, November 15, 2007 | 7:00 p.m., Higgins 310
Presented by Fr. Donal Godfrey, S.J, Executive Director of University Ministry at the University of San Francisco.
This Thursday! Author Fr. Donal Godfrey comes to speak about his experience and book about working with a Catholic parish in the Castro in San Francisco that is inclusive of the gay community.
Gays and Grays: The Story of the Gay Community at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Parish in San Francisco
Thursday, November 15, 2007 | 7:00 p.m., Higgins 310
Presented by Fr. Donal Godfrey, S.J, Executive Director of University Ministry at the University of San Francisco.
Monday, November 5, 2007
ALLIES--Catholicism and Sexuality with Fr. Himes 11/8
Sponsored by the GLC and the Theology department, Fr. Himes will be leading a discussion about Catholicism and sexual ethics to try and begin the conversation that we struggle with at Boston College. Come join us in the Gasson Honors Library (Gasson 112) this Thursday, 11/8, at 7:30 PM. This is a great event especially for Allies to be a part of!
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