Homosexuality + religion = a difficult and dangerous mix.
Difficult because religious leaders everywhere are using dogmatic interpretations of their faith to exclude gay people from their communities. Dangerous because some state governments support these dogmatic views and actively hunt down the queers: in Iran for example two 18 year old gay boys were hanged to death and in the northern regions of Nigeria gay people can be sentenced to death by stoning under the current law.
Gays are the ultimate sinners for the millions of people who are blindly following these dogmatic views. Yet isn’t hatred a sin as well? And what about cruelty? Come to think of it, didn’t God create all of mankind in His Own image? So how come in the eyes of these believers gay people are wrong from the minute they were born? Our two guests of this episode of QAF Beijing, a gay Muslim from Xinjiang and a gay Jew studied in Xinjiang, have come across these questions and contradictions more than often. They had to defend their sexual identity to their fellow believers and they had to explain to their gay friends why it’s important for them to belong to a religious group. We’ll listen to them as they talk about their struggles to combine their gay and religious identities.
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