|
I fear, at the same time, that progressives in
America, stung by the recent election defeat,
may pull back from our support of gay and lesbian
rights. Once again, the Christian right’s
obsession with homosexuality, embedded in its
very selective understanding of morality, is seeking
to bully the rest of us. I hope, as do many of
us, that their successes will be short lived.
It goes without saying that many conservative
and orthodox Jews also subscribe to this selective
morality, arguing that Leviticus 18:22 prohibits
same sex unions. This same thinking
would have us condoning slavery today as well
as the second class status of women – and even
stoning to death our disobedient teenagers.
Many of us grapple with the pluses and minuses
of Reform Judaism. But surely one of its big
pluses has been its conviction that Jewish law is
not frozen – that indeed Judaism has a responsibility
to continue evolving as society and moral
sensibilities change, and as science provides us
with new understandings.
To me, the ongoing struggle for gay and lesbian
rights and equality in America is the Civil
Rights struggle of these decades. Looking back
on the 1960s Civil Rights struggle now – forty
years later – almost all of us view it as a great
victory for humanity, and wonder how decent
people, indeed religious people, could have
been opposed to it. The same I believe will
become the case in our current struggle. It was
heartening to see that as Jews - a people not so
long ago the object of intense vilification in this
country - we were in the forefront of that earlier
civil rights struggle. We need to be in the forefront
of this struggle as well.
I’m as proud as I can be that BAJC is a congregation
with zero tolerance for homophobia,
as is our Union for Reform Judaism.
My father often told us the story of an African
American who, in the 1920s sought to "rid himself
of his blackness" by burning his skin with
acid. I find it nearly as tragic to hear cases of gay
and lesbian individuals, who believe they have to
deny their sexual orientation, as biologically driven
as skin color, in order to be respectable or
acceptable. Similarly, I cringe at the thought that
individuals seeking to come to grips with issues
of sexual identity – or any other such issue –
should find these deeply personal struggles the
object of vicious attacks made by the Christian
right and their political cronies in the name of
"family values."
My hope is that BAJC will continue to be in the
forefront of congregations, Jewish and non-
Jewish, in insisting that God made all human
beings in the Divine image – and that there are
simply no exceptions to that understanding.
Amen.
B’Shalom, Jim
|
