1:30—3:30p
Lunch with religious leaders of Yogyakarta. I must mention here that an extraordinary young woman who did a major portion of the translation for us was Habibah, a young Muslim woman who wears a jilbab. She was the person that the Women’s Coalition sent out weeks before to invite religious leaders to this luncheon. I wish I could have been an ant on the wall as she walked into the Roman Catholic Vicariate of Yogyakarta to invite them to lunch with a Roman Catholic lesbian priest ! Of the 20 religious leaders present from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestant Churches, not one of them was Catholic---which of course I was not surprised at. But perhaps receiving the invitation to the lunch from Habibah made some intriguing impression.
Sitting outside under a thatched roof on a raised platform of bamboo, we all had our lunch. Amidst the lunch we spoke informally, yet a microphone was passed around so that all could hear. A Muslim man said that the verses of the Qur’an say that homosexuality is a disorder. Some feel that only people with low IQ’s are homosexual. He said that for himself it was a process because one of his children was gay and it took time for him to accept that. But now it was no problem, but he wanted to offer these thoughts because it is still hard generally for people to accept. Wilis who had been on the panel with me earlier again repeated what she had said regarding the Buddha and doctrines. A woman from the Dept. of Religious Diversity who was Hindu said that women’s leadership in Hinduism was not a problem, it was the culture around the religion that tried to “keep women in their place.” Another person offered that all texts, in any religion, have two faces: one that is about equality and the other that is prejudiced toward women. Near the end of the lunch a young Christian woman said she hoped that a forum lunch like this would happen again because of the need for dialogue across religious traditions.
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