Some LGBTQ believers stick with faiths that repudiate them
When queer students at Yeshiva University sued the school for discrimination in spring 2021, critics were quick to question why LGBTQ students would opt for an Orthodox Jewish university in the first place.
But for many LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, as with believers of other faiths, their religious identities are as nonnegotiable as their queer identities.
“A lot of people ask, why would somebody who is queer stay Orthodox? It’s like saying, there’s conflict in your family — why don’t you just leave?” Rachael Fried, a Yeshiva alumna and executive director of JQY (Jewish Queer Youth), a nonprofit that supports Orthodox Jewish queer youth, told Religion News Service.
In churches, synagogues and mosques as in families, religious teaching and texts are often cited in rejecting LGBTQ members, and many queer believers feel they have no choice but to leave. Many end up rejecting religion as a whole; others find meaning in accepting faith communities. But some LGBTQ religious people are reconciling parts of themselves that their faith’s doctrines frame as incompatible, continuing to serve and worship even where they are officially considered in violation of divine law or are barred from leadership.
___
This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.
___
For Madeline Marlett, it was the Jesuits who first showed her that being a Catholic, queer trans woman was possible.
Growing up in Texas, in a devoutly Catholic household of 10, Marlett told RNS, she would pray every night that she’d wake up the next morning in a different body. Years later, as a student at the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit school in Worcester, Massachusetts, the...