Jewish Group

ismnotwasm

(41,989 posts) Thu Dec 19, 2013, 04:57 PM Dec 2013

5 Reasons Being an Orthodox Rabbi Compelled Me to Support Gay Marriage

Granting basic rights to the LGBT community is an issue of basic economic justice, legal equality, and human dignity. Traditional Jewish law has no established model for gay marriage, but this is an entirely separate matter. We have no right to coercively prevent, by force of civil law, an individual from enjoying true happiness and fulfilling their life potential when it poses no harm to any other. Our stance on religious law and our stance on political law are not intertwined. This is not about any particular religious rule or custom but about the grander ethos of the Torah. Denying gay people the right to marry is contrary to basic justice and therefore contrary to Jewish ethics. We must support all safe families for children and build our society around strong, loving homes. The Jewish tradition cherishes values of love, intimacy, family, and creating sacred homes where G-d can dwell and mandates that we support them.

Our obligation is derived from our shared history as Jews, religious Jews in particular. We have been very successful change makers in the world because throughout history we have often been outsiders, and we can empathize with the plight others who have been, or are being, excluded or discriminated against. However, the Jewish people are today generally accepted in America, and due the comfort of inclusion, we sometimes lose sight of our tragic heritage and the sensibilities and responsibilities we ought to have as a result. For this reason, among many others, religious Jews should support those struggling for their basic rights in America and keep in the forefront of our minds the not-so-distant exclusion, violence, and vitriol we endured in our own struggle for basic human rights.

I know from my own personal relationships, many of my religious students have suffered from severe depression and have become suicidal because of harassment, bullying, exclusion, and cruelty that they have suffered for simply existing as who they are. Legal inequality is another part of the larger cultural oppression that subsequently leads to higher LGBT suicide rates. I will no longer sit on the sidelines stuck in moral paralysis while this crisis continues. Any alternative to allowing all to marry in civil law would feel anti-religious to me, as it continues to alienate and endanger a vulnerable population. Granting full and equal rights is the only moral option. But let us not delude ourselves: If marriage equality is granted, but nothing else changes, that suicide rate won't change much either. There is still a broader cultural ethos of treating all others with dignity that must be addressed, and on this issue, religious leaders must set the tone.

The focus on controlling civil marriage definitions distracts from more important religious issues of sexual ethics, such as adultery, modesty shaming, objectification of women, rape culture, sexual purity, and a responsible sexual ethic for intimacy. By focusing on gay marriage in a cultural context in which the nation as a whole simply does not and will not accept the premise that marriage needs to be defined by G-d and the Bible, traditionalists are losing credibility and causing people to ignore religious leaders when we discuss holiness in sexuality. This true and beautiful concept has come to be perceived as coded language for anti-gay sentiment as all meaning of sexual ethics has collapsed into anti-gay-marriage politic. The religious-sexual conversation has lost credibility, and that is a terrible misstep. Today it is critical that we emphasize our most important religious values such as tzedek (justice), rachamim (compassion), and pikuach nefesh (saving lives) as we further a discourse around the spirituality of intimacy. We have caused too many to turn from religious values or discount us as bigoted or no longer relevant.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-shmuly-yanklowitz/orthodox-rabbi-gay-marriage_b_4452154.html