With the California Supreme Court’s recent decision to not overturn Proposition 8, a number of more hyperbolic commentators took the opportunity to compare the continued commingling of religion, public policy and sexual orientation to the oppression faced by gays and lesbians living in predominantly Muslim countries. While one certainly doesn’t want to minimize just how disturbing the motivations behind (and portent of) Prop 8 were, one only needs to watch A Jihad for Love to know that we have a long way — a very long way — to go before our fundamentalist nutballs begin to look like the Arab world’s fundamentalist nutballs. Director Parvez Sharma takes the discussion to its most effective forum: the way these laws work on real folk. By looking at the day-to-day lives of 16 different people who are wrestling with their faith, the laws of their land and the fact that they’re gay, Sharma not only emphasizes the deleterious impacts of legislated morality, but also the sheer normalcy of her subjects. In a dozen different countries, these 16 people all struggle with many of the same issues — exclusion, oppression, confusion — but they’re all so utterly unremarkable as subjects that the intolerance they face seems that much more bizarre. While the brisk running time of A Jihad for Love doesn’t allow Sharma to paint a full picture of any of his subjects, quantity more than makes up for quality in this case.
