Jakarta – The country's second-largest Muslim organization, Muhammadiyah, said on Thursday it would not issue any edict condemning members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community as was done earlier by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) and the country's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU).
Muhammadiyah's secretary-general, Abdul Mukti, said Muhammadiyah considered LGBT expression immoral, but that publicly condemning people affiliated with those identities and orientations would not help them return to normalcy.
"Muhammadiyah only recognizes relationships between men and women united in marriage who are not related by blood," Mukti told The Jakarta Post.
He said approaches using edicts or verbal theological condemnation in public would not be effective in dealing with the LGBT issue.
"That's why we think dialogue is an alternative solution – to avoid unproductive arguments in public," Mukti said, adding that Muhammadiyah would provide counseling for LGBT people who wanted to seek "help".
He said people who had chosen LGBT as their sexual lifestyle tended to use the examples of people in their neighborhood such as close friends or public figures and idols to justify their decisions.
In addition to the MUI and NU campaigns, a joint interfaith forum comprising NGOs representing Islam, Catholicism, Buddhism and Confucianism also stepped up campaign in late February to condemn LGBT people and any campaigns related to them.
Both MUI and NU have demanded the prosecution of LGBT people and campaigners, but the interfaith forum claimed that that proposal was unnecessary because LGBT people should be embraced with affection to enable guiding them back to normalcy.