Mosques and Welcoming LGBT People

A recent row has erupted over Sojourners’ refusal to air an ad that supports welcoming churches. In this context, a welcoming church is a church that allows anyone to enter to worship, regardless of sexual orientation. To be clear, the ad did not “promote” homosexuality, advocate for churches to perform weddings for gay couples, or endorse any activity that church might find objectionable. The ad, in my reading, says that anyone who believes in God is welcome in a house of worship.

As Muslims living in America, we too will be faced with a similar issue: how welcoming will we be? Like the ad, I am not advocating for a discussion on the theological question of homosexuality or support of same-sex marriage. I am interested in how do we treat people. Amongst immigrants, the first generation was fairly ethnocentric, so Arabs would build one mosque, and South Asians another. If populations were large enough, you could get subdivided further, so that there would be a Lebanese mosque, a Syrian mosque, a Pakistani mosque, and an Indian mosque. In the second generation, those types of divides are disappearing, and many centers are becoming multi-ethnic and include African-Americans.