TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
LGBT people have right to live equally with others: Yenny Wahid
Change Size
Wahid Foundation executive director Yenny Wahid hands over a survey report on pluralism and tolerance to National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) chief Suhardi Alius in Bogor on Tuesday. (thejakartapost.com/Muhammad Reza)
T
he lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community is a minority group that is entitled to state protection, according to the Wahid Foundation.
Yenny Wahid, the foundation’s executive director, said Islam ensured the right to life for all people, including those considered sexually deviant.
“LGBT people existed around the time of the prophet Muhammad 15 centuries ago. They were called khuntsah,” she said in a discussion in Bogor, West Java, on Tuesday.
Yenny is the daughter of late president Abdurrahman Wahid, the former leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia.
On Monday, the foundation announced the results of a survey conducted in April in cooperation with the Indonesia Survey Institute (LSI). The survey revealed that 26.1 percent of the 1,520 respondents across the country's 34 provinces disliked LGBT people. Meanwhile, 38.7 percent of respondents did not harbor any dislike toward other groups.
Other disliked groups included communists (16.7 percent), Jews (10.6 percent), Christians (2.2 percent), Shiites (1.3 percent), Wahhabis (0.5 percent), Buddhists (0.4 percent) and Chinese-Indonesians (0.4 percent).
“We conducted the survey in April, when the LGBT issue went viral on social media. Therefore, the respondents were influenced to name LGBT people as the most disliked,” Yenny said. (rez)
