GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

I’ve been concerned that more than 100 rabbis affiliated with Conservative Judaism, the movement in which I was a member and leader for my entire life until 2003, have been quoted in the press or signed statements opposing the man-woman definition of marriage. Same-sex marriage is forbidden by both Conservative and Orthodox Jewish law. So I have written rabbis who have done so (whose E-mail addresses I could find) the following letter:

Dear Rabbi-

I’ve been surprised at the large number of Conservative rabbis (I count at least 115) who are openly supporting same-sex civil marriage. The list includes some rabbis I have known and respected for many years (I was an observant Conservative Jew until 2003 when I became Orthodox). Given our tradition’s clear opposition to same-sex civil marriage, I was hoping you might explain to me why you think it is legitimate to support something our tradition suggests that G-d rejects.

Of course, I know there are many Conservative rabbis who think halacha is binding unless it conflicts with the platform of the Democratic Party. But the list of Conservative rabbis supporting same-sex civil marriage includes many rabbis who I know to be far more sophisticated and committed to the halachic process than that. The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has never endorsed same-sex civil or religious marriage, so I would like to hear your intellectual and religious bases for flouting halacha in this area. The facts, as I understand them, are as follows:

1. The Talmud in Chullin 92a quotes Ulla as saying “This verse (Zacharia 11:12) refers to the 30 commandments which the Noahides have accepted. But they keep only three of them,” one of which is not drawing up marriage contracts between men.

2. The Sifra on Acharei Mot discusses the pasuk (Vayikra 18:3) warning us against the “deeds of the Land of Egypt” and the “deeds of the Land of Canaan.” It says that the deeds in question include that “a man would marry a man, a woman would marry a woman, and a woman would be married to two men.”

3. The midrash in Bereishit Rabbah (25:6) quotes Rav Huna: “The generation of the flood was not obliterated until they wrote marriage contracts for males and animals.”

4. The notion that Jews must try to establish the Noahide laws for everyone is well established. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe insisted that we enforce Noahide laws by any means at our disposal: “We must do everything possible to ensure that the seven Noahide laws are observed. If this can be accomplished through force or through other kinder and more peaceful means through explaining to non-Jews that they should accept God’s wishes [we should do so]…Anyone who is able to influence a non-Jew in any way to keep the seven commandments is obligated to do so, since that is what God commanded Moses our teacher.” (“Sheva Mitzvot Shel Benai Noach,” Hapardes 59:9 7-11, 5745)

Clearly, Jewish law calls on committed Jews to oppose same-sex civil marriage. Taking the above rabbinic texts seriously, I do not see how one can conclude anything other than that G-d wants us to fight “marriage equality.” Could you please explain your thought process in coming to the opposite conclusion?

Unless you ask me not to, I will happily post your answer at my Web site, GaysDefendMarriage.com.

Yours,

David Bianco Benkof

So far I have heard back from ten rabbis, none of whom has given a substantive reason relating to Jewish law as to why it’s OK to advocate something Conservative and Orthodox Jewish law oppose.

Yet to be heard from are four LGBT rabbis (Jill Hammer, J.B. Rosen, Benay Lappe, and Tracee L. Rosen), six rabbis who have written pro-gay legal opinions – though no opinion approving of same-sex marriage has ever been approved by the movement’s Law Committee (Avram Reisner, Brad Artson, Daniel Nevins, David Fine, Elliot Dorff, and Gordon Tucker), and six rabbis I have known for a long time (Amy Eilberg, Elianna Yolkut, H. David Rose, H. David Teitelbaum, Marvin Goodman, and Sheldon Lewis). In all, 91 rabbis have yet to respond. Rabbis are busy people, of course, and many go on vacation during the summer. As the responses come in, I will post them, along with my reactions, in the comments section below.

My most recent column, Marriage equality for some postpones gay equality for all, is up at the Web site of the Boulder, Colorado Daily Camera. It’s also running in several Scripps newspapers on the east coast of Florida.

The conclusion:

I totally understand that for many lesbians and gay men, the ego boost of having the governments of California and Massachusetts declare their relationships completely equal feels terrific. I haven’t forgotten the loneliness and stigma of growing up gay. But it is selfish, unfair, and even cruel for LGBT people in very progressive states to insist on retaining a purely semantic change that endangers the rights and freedoms of gays and lesbians in places where homophobia is much stronger and where the protections Americans would readily support are desperately needed.

So now a major report endorsed by leading adoption groups recommends that adoption agencies be allowed to discriminate based on race:

The report recommends that the law — the Multiethnic Placement Act, which covers agencies receiving federal dollars and promotes a color-blind approach — be amended to permit agencies to consider race and culture as one of many factors when selecting parents for children from foster care.

The marriage equality crowd is always claiming that race analogies are perfectly legitimate when it comes to same-sex marriage. So it must be fair for me to use a race analogy with adoption – if the expert consensus is that adoption agencies should legitimately be allowed to use race as a factor in placing children, shouldn’t they also be allowed to consider whether a home provides both a mother and a father?

I’ve felt for a long time that the most important secular reason to preserve man-woman marriage is because the ideal environment to raise a child has both a mother and a father. Well, a Providence, Rhode Island, academic and medical expert, Dr. Daniel Harrop, has weighed in on my side of the parenting debate:

Marriage is a core social institution, the only one we have that is dedicated to communicating and reinforcing a unique and vitally important task: bringing together men and women to make and raise the next generation together….

Existing scientific data suggests that the law of marriage protects children to the extent it increases the likelihood that children will be born to and raised by their own mother and father in a harmonious, lasting union….

As a psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor at Brown, I am well aware that proponents of same-sex marriage will cite the American Psychiatric Association and other professional organizations to justify their view: There is nothing scientific at all about the view that a child needs his mother and father.

The scientific reality is that there are only a handful of studies on same-sex parenting (less than 50 total), and almost none of them are based on nationally representative data, which means we simply do not know how typical or atypical the gay parents and their children studied are.

The point I wish to underscore here is not that gay people cannot be good parents (just as many single mothers and fathers are good parents), but that there is something special and distinctive about sexual unions that can both create life and connect those babies to a mother and father.

MarriageDebate.com reprints a letter to the editor from Kate Martin, a lesbian mother in St. Louis (where I live, by coincidence) who opposes same-sex marriage. Some excerpts follow:

A letter was published May 20th about the California Supreme Court ruling which overturned that state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The writer stated “gay marriage will be the law of the land, and intolerant straights will just have to get over it.”

The writer puts the issue in a very small frame in which to think about the conflict. If people are against two men or two women being legally married then they are called intolerant or worse. The writer calls it “hateful discrimination that fearful Missouri voters wrote into their constitution.”…

If one views the issue of same-sex marriage in very tight boundaries – as people who are in love and want to share benefits – it would indeed seem very small and petty to object. But it is not a simple “love and benefits” issue.

Same-sex marriage is a radical leftist concept pushed by gay leftists elites who themselves sneer at the instituiton of marriage and monogamy….

Change the definition of marriage just once and there will be continuous change from here on out until it is completely unrecognizable and meaningless. And that is the goal.

The news that New York Gov. David Paterson plans to order his state’s agencies to recognize out-of-town same-sex marriages is troubling.

The majority of Americans support gay civil rights and domestic partnership but oppose same-sex marriage. Now in three states (Massachusetts, California, and New York), gay-rights laws and domestic partnership laws have been cited by the judicial or executive branches as a reason to impose gay marriage in states that repeatedly failed to redefine marriage through legislative means. The Human Rights Law Gov. Paterson says requires state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages only covers sexual orientation because of New York’s 2002 Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA).

But according to law professor Jay Weiser, a member of a gay law association, writing in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, “SONDA’s legislative history, however, specifically disclaimed any intent to affect the right to marry under New York law.” I could not find the text of SONDA anywhere, but according to New York Judge Doris Ling-Cohan’s pro-same-sex marriage ruling in Hernandez v. Robles, “the SONDA law states explicitly that it is not to be construed to require or prohibit marriage rights for same-sex couples.”

Gov. Paterson was the Democratic leader of the State Senate at the time of SONDA’s passage.

Given what has happened in state after state, could someone please give me a good reason why a person with the majority opinion toward gay issues should ever support non-discrimination laws or domestic partnerships? It seems to me that the only way to help gay and lesbian couples in distress but preserve the definition of marriage is to withdraw support for anything the gay community asks for until we can pass the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Transgender blogger Monica Roberts writes at Transgriot why she and other transgender people oppose the prioritization of marriage:

The first gay-only rights bill, passed in Wisconsin in 1982 has been that way for 25 years now. There’s no indication by the GLB leadership in that state if they’ll move to rectify the omission of their transgender brothers and sisters or if they’ll assign it a priority as high as the one they place on marriage equality….

Not long after [the National Center for Transgender Equality's] startup, the shift of the gay and lesbian rights priority from successfully passing inclusive rights laws on a state by state basis to marriage equality started. Transgender leaders such as [the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition's] Vanessa Edwards Foster warned that this was a mistake to push the issue a year before the 2004 elections, but once again transgender concerns were brushed aside.

When the Religious Right backlash resulted in gay marriage constitutional bans overwhelmingly passed in 18 states during that election year, the transgender community was proven correct once again.

This irritated the transgender community on multiple levels. The marriage-as-a-priority gays refused to acknowledge that not only did their actions cause the backlash to gay marriage and possibly generated enough conservative voters at the polls to help propel George W. Bush to a second term, despite the evidence of dozens of state [Defense of Marriage Acts] and anti-marriage constitutional amendments, they are in severe denial about it.

Transpeople are also miffed at the lack of [the Human Rights Campaign] concern as to how this backlash specifically affects our lives. Transpeople were never consulted and had no input whatsoever regarding the push for gay marriage, but the Religious Right anti-gay marriage laws get interpreted by the courts in such a way that they had the negative affect in some cases of wiping out existing pro-trans marriage and even identity rights.

We’re also pissed that the same people who demanded (and still demand) that we accept ‘incremental progress’ when it comes to trans rights hypocritically have no intention of accepting ‘incremental progress’ when it comes to legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

UPDATE: Monica has asked me to make it clear that she adamantly opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment.

An important recent study in the journal Developmental Psychology found that same-sex couples are more satisfied in their relationships than opposite-sex couples – and gay and lesbian couples are generally happy no matter what the legal status of their relationships. From the Washington Post:

The three-year study found that same-sex couples were similar to heterosexual couples in most relationship areas and that legal status didn’t seem to be the overriding factor affecting same-sex relationships.

Regardless of civil union status, same-sex couples were more satisfied with their relationships, reported more positive feelings toward their partners, and reported less conflict than married heterosexual couples.

This study pretty much destroys the frequent argument that gays need marriage because marriage makes people happy. According to American Sexuality Magazine, leading same-sex marriage proponent Jonathan Rauch argued in the New York Times “that gay men and lesbians should be allowed to marry because social science research shows that marriage makes people happier.” Well, the latest social science research shows that marriage is not necessary for same-sex couples to be happier than married couples. In fact, you might predict that marriage will make same-sex couples less happy, since all the married people in the study were less happy in their relationships than same-sex couples, whether or not they were in civil unions.

So, can we now expect Jonathan Rauch to back away from same-sex marriage, now that the rationale he gave in the New York Times no longer works? Of course not. Because the marriage equality movement is not about getting happiness, or hospital visitation rights, or property inheritance rights, or any of the other “benefits” LGBT people are always talking about. If it were, we could probably work out a compromise that respects marriage while relieving the distress of same-sex couples. But the marriage equality movement is about boosting the self-esteem of gay men and lesbians, many of whom had a tough time growing up. And I’d be happy to stroke LGBT egos if the route under discussion wasn’t doing tremendous harm to a central institution in our society.

So San Francisco’s mayor and adulterer-in-chief Gavin Newsom has expressed shock and outrage that San Diego County might allow clerks with religious or moral objections to let another clerk “marry” same-sex couples next month.

(I think it’s really interesting that Newsom and Eliot Spitzer have been perhaps the two most prominent straight elected officials backing marriage equality, given that neither one has any business telling the rest of us what marriage is.)

Newsom suggested that clerks who don’t feel comfortable “marrying” same-sex couples should lose their jobs.

Let me remind you, Mr. Mayor, that supporters of man-woman marriage range along a broad spectrum in terms of our attitudes toward protections and legal recognition for same-sex couples. Some of us would like to see a compromise in which same-sex partners get the right to hospital visitation and inheritance, for example. Others don’t want to give an inch to radical gay activists who have been trying to destroy a central societal institution. Given that supporters of man-woman marriage are in the majority both in California and nationwide, Newsom and his allies would be smart to be flexible and compassionate in the short five months during which the law is on his side, because when the law is not on his side beginning in November, he’s probably going to want man-woman marriage defenders to be flexible and compassionate.

Threatening to fire people who took their jobs as clerks during a time when “marrying” men to men and women to women was not part of the job description is neither flexible nor compassionate. If Newsom’s attitude prevails during the brief window of marriage equality, I know I’m certainly not going to be feeling charitable and eager to expend energy toward compromises in the future when same-sex couples ask for protections in various states after the California Marriage Protection Act passes.

A gay man who read my recent opinion piece about why gays shouldn’t celebrate the recent decision shared with me his thoughts, which are below. He’s not completely “out” so I’m not sharing his name or E-mail address. Some of his ideas run counter to things I’ve shared on this blog and in the comments section, but his perspective is valuable and well-expressed, so I thought I’d share it:

It was a 4-3 decision by the California Supreme Court. It overturned a law that was passed by over 4 MILLION Californians. So let’s see…by my math that means 4 people in black robes overturned the will of 4 Million people in the State of California. Interesting. And I always thought we lived in a democracy. Aren’t the first three words of the Constitution “We the People?” Didn’t Lincoln say that this was a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Well, in state after state the people have spoken loud and clear and they all say that marriage is between a man and a woman. If the definition of marriage is to change then it is up to the people to make those changes, not activist judges.