By Cristyan Costa
On April 28th, the Brazilian National LGBT+ Association and the Latin Gay Network will launch a manual with gay groups’ views on the Bible.
The manual analyzes passages in the Holy Bible considered discriminatory and seeks to put them in a “current context”.
In announcing the release, the movement’s official website informed: “‘And I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven’ is the verse that guided the preparation of this publication, driven by the desire to open the closets that for so long have imprisoned the divergent experiences of gender and sexuality in Christianity.”
“Our alternative, for those for whom Christianity still makes some sense, is to seek own ways of reading not only these texts, but the biblical message as a whole,” notes an excerpt from the text.
“In what follows, some possible exercises for liberating the biblical message and peeking through the keyhole are presented.”
The 130-page document is divided into “closets” and “keys.”
Each chapter is a new opening, “creating exits that allow us to recognize and celebrate the individualities, the differences, and the uniqueness of each person who sets out on this journey toward a liberating living of Christianity.”
In a certain passage, the booklet teaches about the gender identities that the manual says exist, among them, “non-binarity,” “cisgender,” and “transgender.”
Also, the manual states that supposed prejudices against LGBT+ people have been condensed into so-called “gender ideology.”
“Forged initially by Roman Catholic groups in the 1990s, this expression has been adopted and disseminated by segments of other Christian denominations and by groups and people who use Christian language,” the text notes.
“The aim is to demonize the category ‘gender’ – a tool born in feminist studies to analyze patterns of identity and relationship that sustain structural inequalities and violence – and thus to delegitimize at the same time the field of gender studies, the LGBTI+, and feminist movements, and the struggles for the guarantee and expansion of sexual and reproductive rights and free gender expression.”
With information from Revista Oeste
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