Last week, the rainbow pride flag was hoisted proudly at Union and University for Pride Week. To me—and, I imagine, to many others—the Queen’s celebration is a show of natural solidarity, with similar events held across Canada and around the world.
Nothing could make me happier than seeing this event so well established at Queen’s. However, we must never allow the feel-good sentiment that this vibrant week evokes let us forget that this campus remains wrought with homophobia.
I’m writing to draw attention to a specific form of homophobia running rampant at this university that I find particularly insidious in nature—religious intolerance of Queer identities.
I’m chair of the AMS religious affairs committee. I know that religious faith can be a wonderful, powerful thing that can profoundly influence a person’s identity.
However, religious faith can also change the way a person perceives and reacts to other identities.
This is the point where religion can become deeply and tragically intertwined with all kinds of oppression against those of different faiths, genders, races or sexual orientations. This oppression is not an inevitable consequence of religion.
There is, however, no denying that faith-based oppression can happen. For this reason, I’ve sought in my position this year to address the relationship between religious issues and other social concerns.
It was with this goal in mind that I approached the chair of EQuIP (Education on Queer Issues Project) in January with an idea to collaborate on an event aimed at tackling faith-based oppression of Queer identities.
The event featured a screening and discussion of the beautiful documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, a film claiming that reconciliation of religious and queer identities is possible.
We hoped that by working together on this event we could bring together people of many identities for an educational discussion, and by many s were successful at doing so within that room.
It was on Queen’s campus at large that homophobia reared its repulsive head. Posters were defaced with homophobic slurs and ripped down, but what really churned my stomach was the outright violence experienced by certain committee .
One, while putting up a poster, had it ripped down and was told “you’re going straight to hell.” I saying to myself that this was the first time in my two years here I was truly ashamed of my school.
I expected better of Queen’s. I expected better at a university—a supposed bastion of progressive thought—than this bigotry.
You may be wondering why, of all forms of homophobia, I find faith-based homophobia to be particularly insidious.
Stop and think for a second about what the statement “you’re going to hell” implies. Hell is a place for lost souls, a place (in most Christian traditions at least) of eternal torment for souls so steeped in sin they are utterly unworthy of the presence of God.
When a believing Christian tells an LGBT person he or she is going to hell, they are showing contempt for his or her soul, the very essence of the person’s existence as a human being.
This is a dehumanizing dimension of hatred far deeper than simple distaste for a certain sexual orientation or gender identity.
It’s not my intention to single out Christianity. I’m well aware that faith-based intolerance of Queer identities is by no means limited to certain Christian-identified people.
I’m writing to denounce hatred. No one should ever go through the kind of sick abuse that people involved in our event had to go through. Period. End of story.
Case closed.
I feel that it’s my responsibility as a concerned member of this community to bring to public consciousness the ugliness of the intolerance still present at this school.
We’re coming into a time when Queer identities are (slowly) becoming accepted in the public sphere. The intolerance, however, hasn’t gone away; it’s just less blatant.
Incidents such as those surrounding my event, while rare, nevertheless serve to confirm this sad reality. We must, as a community, not allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security.
I’d like to finish with a bit of my favourite scripture. In what I consider to be the most beautifully simple yet powerful statement of the entire Bible, Jesus tells us to “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets,” (Matthew 7:12).
Did you get that last bit? Basically, Jesus is saying “I just summed up the entirety of God’s law for you in a nutshell. Follow this one simple rule, and God will be happy.” He also tells us to “Love thy neighbour as yourself.” I don’t think you have to be Christian to agree that this is probably some pretty good advice.
Fellow students, regardless of religious convictions, gender, race or sexual orientation, we are all “neighbours” in this unique and wonderful place we call Queen’s University.
Despite our great diversity of identities, we have in common a fundamental desire to be treated as independent, thinking, feeling, loving human beings.
It would be nice if we could do a better job at this school of respecting each other as such.
Michael Scott is chair of the religious affairs committee in the Social Issues Commission (SIC).
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