As a gay person, I am often asked how Quakers reconcile Biblical statements about homosexuality. There is no single Quaker view or statement because the Society of Friends does not make prescriptive statements about what its members should believe. What follows is what a small working group from QLGF believes to be a broad Quaker approach. It does NOT, however, constitute an official Quaker statement - although we hope that the majority of Quakers would agree with it.

We would expect all Quakers to test their attitudes rigorously against their experience and come to honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conclusions. We use as a guiding principle the belief that the presence of God is consistently revealed in the lives of women and men and so we encouraged to test all religious writings (from other faiths as well as Christianity) to see what truths they may hold for us.

We try not to take quotations from the Bible out of context and apply them to a social and religious climate for which they were not designed. Thus, the verses which are often cited against homosexuality might have had relevance for a particular time, place and culture. We would not necessarily accept them as equally relevant to a 21st century Western European culture.