Tom Facchine – Is It Discrimination or Affirmation

			Understanding discrimination is a really important thing recently, there's a lot of legislation
being adopted, you know, both nationally, but also informally when it comes to universities,
colleges, right MSA is regarding discrimination, specifically discrimination based off of, you know,
sort of newer concerns such as sexual identity and you know, gender identity and sexual orientation.
But we really need a more robust understanding of what we mean, when we talk about discrimination,
right? Discrimination can mean so many things. It's a very, very vague term. And the fear is, and
it's a legitimate fear that the term discrimination is going to be wielded against us in order to
		

			completely undermine everything that Islam is about, right. Discrimination should not be conflated
with affirmation, okay, nobody has the right to expect everybody's going to affirm you in what you
do, or what you believe. That's just facts. You know, that's, we wouldn't accept that with any other
things. So, you know, what discrimination should mean specifically is that nobody is going to treat
you in a sort of a way that's going to, you know, exclude you for things that you do and mistakes
that you make. Okay, so people bring up the example all the time of like, well, some sins are
treated asymmetrically. So if somebody drinks alcohol, then that's treated differently as somebody
		

			who's you know, involved in homosexual relationships, you know, somebody comes into the masjid and
they are known to drink alcohol, then they're going to be met with a lot more acceptance than
somebody who is, you know, engaging in homosexual relationships. And that's true. However, what
about when it comes to the person who's trying to normalize a certain belief? Does the person who's
drinking alcohol believe that alcohol is halal, or is trying to tell everybody else that alcohol is
halal, this is something that undermines our faith. And it's something that actually to be quite
frank, as co founder, it's something that is, you know, a denial of something very, very important
		

			in our faith. And so that's where the line should be drawn. Yes, if somebody is behaving sort of in
a very an overly antagonistic way to somebody who is a sinner, but who admits that they're sinning,
right, then that sort of discrimination, we need to work on that. And we need to make sure you know,
you had at the time of the Prophet alayhi, salatu salam companion would come in and pee in MSG,
right? And what was the way that the Prophet said, I said, I'm dealt with that person was to educate
and to help and to uplift and enlighten. That's very, very different from a person who's trying to
come in and change what our deen is, and change what Islam is, and say, well, Islam actually says
		

			that this thing is permissible. That's not acceptable. In fact, you're undermining what Islam
actually is, you're actually threatening this thing that everybody else believes in and everybody
else sets their lives up, you know, around and informs you know, the direction that they're going in
their lives. So we can't that's not something that first of all, to have an attitude of antagonism
towards that is not discrimination and should not be conflated with discrimination. And that's a
quite natural response. Right as Muslims we have the right to to believe in normative Islam and
defend normative Islam. It can't be called discrimination when we defend normative Islam against
		

			people who want to change it into something that it's not