This article appeared as an op-ed on June 25, 2019 at the Kyiv Post.

Our Tradition Is Freedom! Kyiv Pride 2019. Equality March, June 23.

Here in Toronto it’s seven hours earlier than in Ukraine. Throughout the day of Kyiv Pride’s Equality March on Sunday, June 23, it gave me a sense of quiet joy to peruse the media reports and the photo updates of my many LGBTQ friends in Ukraine as these passed in steady succession through my Facebook news feed.

My readers will recall that I had appealed both to President Zelensky (here) and to Metropolitan Epiphanius (here and here) to join political and spiritual forces—in ways that maintain the separation of church and state necessary to a 21^st-century Western democracy—to forge a new Ukraine where all citizens feel free and safe to thrive according to their own lights, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

This made it all the more gratifying to read of Zelensky’s remarks in support of Kyiv Pride, the robust police protection at the March, the relative absence of confrontations compared to prior years, the largest turnout in Kyiv Pride’s history, the participation of several celebrities and government officials from Ukraine and abroad (including Canadian ambassador, Roman Waschuk), and—perhaps most astonishing of all—the presence of over thirty LGBTQ members of the Ukrainian armed forces. Read More

As part of Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s commitment to publish a diversity of views we encourage our readers to consider writing a letter to the editors. Our Letters page is our fifth most popular “article” of all time—which means that it gets lots and lots of views.

Check the Letters page for brief guidelines and the almost three dozen letters published to date. You’ll see that we don’t shy away from letters that are highly critical of us. Read More

In a climate of fear where Orthodox bishops and clergy feel that they have to come to us “by night,” as it were, to express their support for Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s commitment to keeping sexuality and gender front and centre of intra-Orthodox debate—and where one bishop is even forbidden by the Holy Synod of his jurisdiction to publish his views on these questions—we thank Protodeacon Feldman for his courage in attaching his name to the following brief reflection. We pray that others of his fellow clergymen and some of our hierarchs become equally emboldened to speak out publicly. Orthodox children, women, and men whose sense of personal identity falls somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum are literally craving to hear from you.

Christ and St. Photini (Svetlana) at the Well

I want to offer a few brief observations regarding persons identifying as LGBTQ+ in our churches: observations from Scripture, from Tradition, from worship, and from experience.

From Scripture

The Old Testament book of Leviticus includes many commandments that we do not keep—for example, do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (19:19), do not trim your beard (19:27), do not sacrifice an ox outside the camp (17:3-4), render “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (24:19-20). Those who cite 18:22 and 20:13 (do not “lie with a male as with a woman”) as prohibitions against homosexuality pluck them from a whole that we no longer countenance. In doing so—in selecting those commandments that they consider applicable to our culture—they confess to discerning how to apply Scripture to our lives. But then we may contest their discernment and counter that these verses, like the others, do not make sense in our culture. Read More

St. Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch. Menologion of Basil II. Circa AD 1000.

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There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Gal 3:28

Much has been made of the timing of the publication by the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education of their document, “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education” [full text at Zenit], during LGBT Pride Month. Yet little attention has been given to the date the document was actually promulgated: the Feast of the Presentation [“the Meeting” in Orthodox parlance]. If one assumed a pedagogical intent from the Congregation for Catholic Education, the selected date celebrates a cast of seeming sexual misfits announcing the dawn of a new age for human sexuality.

Present at the Temple are Joseph, who has specifically not fathered the Child; Simeon, who announces that he is now ready for death upon seeing the infant Messiah; Anna, an 84-year old prophetess who has spent the majority of her life as a widow; and the Virgin Mary. The irony inherent in the biblical account is that Mary and Jesus are there for “their purification according to the law of Moses” (Lk 2:22), as if the birth of the Messiah had actually rendered Mary ritually unclean (Lev 12:1-4). Both Simeon and Anna prophetically upend messianic expectations, announcing to all a newborn Child-Messiah. The feast day upon which the document is promulgated is a celebration of transcended genders, explicitly because in the Incarnation human sexuality is divinized. The Roman liturgy’s responsory for the day reflects this transformation of gender: Zion, let your wedding chamber be prepared to receive Christ your King. The Virgin conceived and gave birth to a Son, yet she remained a virgin forever. Read More