For religious community representatives gathered at a national faith forum in support of LGBTI rights, the spirit is willing • Tiernan Brady: Religious faith is no obstacle to support for marriage equality

“We celebrate all rites except one: we can’t celebrate the love of two people with a wedding ceremony,” Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio of the Emanuel synagogue, says.

Ninio says that despite wanting to celebrate same-sex marriages, she is limited to calling them them commitment ceremonies or covenants of love.

Based in Sydney’s east, Emanuel was founded as a progressive synagogue, and already has celebrations for anniversaries of gay relationships, and rituals for coming out and gender affirmation.

Ninio is just one of the faith leaders who have been proselytising the message that advocacy for LGBTI rights and religion don’t sit uneasily together, but go hand in hand.

Legalising same-sex marriage is needed to inject faith back into what could become a secular institution, to transform the secular into the sacred, she says.

“I feel my religious freedom is being infringed by not being able to perform a [same-sex] marriage.”

Ninio was just one of the representatives of faith communities who gathered in Canberra this week for Australia’s first inter-faith forum on marriage equality.

Dr Gavriel Ansara, a researcher and human rights advocate from an Orthodox Jewish network that affirms LGBTI people, believes that religious freedom is harmed not by same-sex marriage, but by its denial.

Without civil marriage equality, LGBTI people of faith had to choose between a holy life and recognition of their relationships, he says.

Ansara says that when he came to Australia and tried to find a place in the Orthodox Jewish community, he found some rabbis would only accept same-sex attracted people in the manner of others who had erred, such as failing to observe the Sabbath.

He rejected what he called the “lesser Jew trope” that same-sex attraction diminished his faith or status as a religious person.

Ansara says that because Australia does not recognise civil same-sex marriage, the status of his relationship changes between jurisdiction – whereas religious and spiritual experience is universal.



This conviction of the universality of love regardless of sexuality is represented across denominations.



The Anglican dean of Brisbane, Peter Catt, says marriage equality is needed for “human flourishing and good order in society”.

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If good order in the reinvigoration of spirituality in society isn’t argument enough for religious leaders, the Baptist reverend Carolyn Francis has another argument in favour of same-sex marriage: self-interest.



Although men over 50 who lead the church tend to oppose same-sex marriage, younger leaders understand sexual diversity and that exclusion harms spiritual wellbeing, Francis says.

“Young evangelicals leaders are not at all keen to be relegated to a cultural ghetto defined by bigotry,” she says. It’s a “strategic” argument that comes on top of the basic demand of justice.

“To put it very crudely: they don’t want to be irrelevant, and they want bums on seats in their churches. To put it a little more elegantly: they want to be relevant and welcoming.”

Francis says she had encountered people of faith who were “terrified” of same-sex marriage, because they had seen communication from “scurrilous groups that shall not be named” that led them to believe churches would be forced to conduct same-sex marriages.

The same-sex marriage bills before parliament contain no such requirement, and as such do not threaten religious freedom, the religious attendees concluded.

“I won’t let my faith be defined by those obsessed with exclusion … For Australia the Good News would be that same-sex couples will not be excluded from marriage [when the law is changed],” Francis says.

Shiffa Samad, from Muslims for Progressive Values, says intolerance of LGBTI people by a faith community was not the only fear she had growing up. Sneaking into gay clubs as a teenager, she found herself ostracised by white queer people and had great difficulty “coming out as Muslim to gay people”.

Reading a diary entry, she recalls “different faces told me the same story: that I needed to come out to my family, that I need to leave them if they don’t accept me”.

“There are correct ways to be gay, and Muslim isn’t it,” she says.

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“It’s better to tell them you’re Hindu or Buddhist, talk about Krishna and Kama Sutra – then suddenly you’re mystical and they want to sleep with you.”

Samad says she “couldn’t stand” mosques for the same reason, of not feeling accepted. Gay Muslims have bigger problems than marriage equality, she says, including the pain of being kicked out of home, being told to pray out the gay, living a lie or being told celibacy is the only answer.

She says she found an interpretation of Islam that did not pit her religion against her sexuality, and a support network that made her feel safe and secure.

Imam Nur Warsame knows the difficulties of being a gay Muslim. He founded the Marhaba (meaning “welcome”) congregation in Melbourne, as a means to improve the welfare of LGBTI Muslims. He is Australia’s first gay imam, and one of only eight or nine in the world. “But I guarantee you there are many, many more,” he quips.

Nur Warsame says the violent rejection of homosexuality in some interpretations of Islam did not exist at the time of Muhammad or in the 400 years after, but was a more recent development, emerging in the last 500 years.

He recounts attempting self-harm and the marginalisation and despair of gay Muslim youth, and people living double lives. “Marriage equality will give hope to a lot of Muslim youth,” he concludes.

Australians for Equality organised the forum as part of a push to create a wide political coalition to legalise same-sex marriage, particularly necessary after the plebiscite bill was voted down in the Senate, leaving a free vote in parliament and cross-party cooperation as the best way forward.



The Australians for Equality director, Tiernan Brady, told the forum: “When someone says they’re a person of faith and for marriage equality, it causes surprise.

“It should be the opposite,” he says, noting that the majority of religious people are in favour of same-sex marriage.

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The human rights commissioner, Ed Santow, who gave the keynote address at the forum, says LGBTI people of faith have “largely been missing” from the national debate.

“It’s vital that those voices and concerns of those people are heard in this debate, not least because ... LGBTI people of faith fall into some of the highest risk categories of poorer mental health outcomes as a consequence of their lived experience.”



Santow says the perception of a division of interests between LGBTI and religious people needs to be broken down.

“The experience of civil marriage equality in countries with much larger faith-based communities than Australia challenges the idea that a country cannot value simultaneously both the faith-based background of its citizens as well as an important representation of equality of LGBTI people,” he says.

And in that lies the point of the national faith forum and the same-sex marriage campaign: to prepare Australia for a time when marriage equality and freedom of religion are both respected, and both identities lie together inseparably entwined.



