.:*~*:. 30 January: Mini Manifesto 1 .:*~*:.

Religious queer people, including and oftentimes especially Jews, are often ostracized by their religious communities for their queerness; at the same time, they will oftentimes find themselves facing the same ostracisation in queer communities on the basis of being religious. That the religious queer community be subject to exclusion from both religious and queer communities who see these two identities as mutually exclusive is an injustice that can be rectified through education and community outreach, all of which I hope to one day help facilitate. As I have broken more and more into the traditional-egalitarian and even Open Orthodox worlds, people would ask me, often politely, often impolitely, about how I reconcile being queer and religious. The answer to this loaded question is different for every queer person of faith, but my main takeaway from being a queer religious person is that it is okay to hold multiple truths at once. Contradiction is inherent to humanity; I am fully queer and fully religious at once and one does not come at the compromise of the other. I believe firmly that the social norms of political conservatives need not act as a roadblock for people of marginalized genders and sexualities to explore traditional religious spaces.