GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

Many California gays and lesbians have pledged to do anything necessary to overturn Proposition 8, particularly by putting another initiative on the ballot in 2010. This effort is unlikely to be successful, particularly because 2008 offered many advantages that 2010 will not. These include:

• With a Democratic president elected in 2008, 2010 is likely to be a better-than-average year for the Republicans.

• It is well-known that in California a few percent of the voters vote no on all the initiatives in order to reject any changes. That means the gay community had the advantage of those few points in 2008; it will have the disadvantage of them in 2010. (Hat tip: Dale Carpenter)

• In 2008, Barack Obama was running for president, a candidate who excited liberal voters and helped draw them to the polls, even though his endorsement of “No on 8″ was tepid at best. He will not be on the ballot in 2010.

• In 2008, Attorney Gen. Jerry Brown changed the ballot title in a way that gave the advantage to the “No” side by focusing on how the initiative took away rights. In 2010, Brown may be running for governor, and it is hard to predict what he will do.

There has never been a successful initiative campaign to implement gay marriage, and all but one of the 30-something initiatives on gay marriage have gone against the gay community’s position.

The gay community’s favorite kinds of arguments, about “civil rights” and “discrimination” and “equality” didn’t work in 2008. Will it repeat the same failed strategy? Other strategies, such as those that actually feature gay men and lesbians, may be even more risky.

There’s more evidence that children need both a mother and a father whenever possible in an unexpected source: gay parenting manuals. These are the experts at gays and lesbians raising children, and several of them acknowledge that when children have two Moms or two Dads, they miss having a parent of the other sex. Some examples:

• The Lesbian and Gay Parenting Handbook says some children accept their lesbian or gay parents, but “some children do express an intense longing for the other biological parent, talking about it frequently and emotionally…. Adolescents take particular interest in both their heredity and in gender-specific role models.” 

• The Lesbian Parenting Book says “It is very normal for children to long about and ask for a father…. It is natural to feel defensive when your child longs for a father. We encourage you to remain patient while she asks questions, sorts out information and comes to terms without knowing her father’s identity, or not having her biological father in her life. She needs to do it…. [Artificially Inseminated] children of lesbian parents may grieve never knowing their biological father.”

• A majority of the Dads in the study described in Gay Men Choosing Parenthood acknowledged “that their children sometimes verbalized a desire for a mother at one time or another.” 

• In For Lesbian Parents: Your Guide to Helping your Family Grow Up Happy, Healthy, and Proud, lesbian Moms are encouraged to ask their daughters “if it’s hard sometimes not having a father. Let her know that you understand that sometimes it is hard.”

• In Gay Dads: A Celebration of Fatherhood, a child, Tyler, whose two Dads no longer live together. When he asks if his mother can come live with him, he is told “She would be welcome, but as a friend.”

There are many other examples. It is stunning to me (just like gay enthusiasm for Mamma Mia! (pdf) and Dreams from my Father) that nobody notices the elephant in the room – gay people acknowledge that children need and/or want a parent of each sex, which should mean that whenever possible we should provide that. However, gay EqualityManiaâ„¢ sets in and nothing could possibly, ever stand in the way of total equality, no matter who it hurts, including children.

The Newsweek cover story described itself as a “religious case” for gay marriage, but it certainly was not a Jewish case. The argument was almost wholly based on the Bible, and while some Protestants take the Bible literally word for word, 99.9 percent of Jews do not (see my Leviticus Traps). A Jewish case for gay marriage, if such a thing was thinkable, would have to deal not only with Biblical texts (they shall be as one flesh, anyone?) but the Talmud (which forbids same-sex civil and religious marriage to Jews and to gentiles), the codes of Jewish law, and modern responsa. There are a tiny number of Bible-only Jews, known as Karaites, and they number maybe 25,000 in the world, to be generous. The cover story was “A liberal Christian case for gay marriage” – which is hardly shocking, since liberal Christianity has been moving in that direction for a long time anyway! Harumph.

A comment on the Rick Warren controversy: the stunning thing in the whole conversation is that most everyone seems to forget that Warren has the same position on gay marriage as Barack Obama. (Hat tip: GayPatriotWest.) It seems a lot of gays and lesbians think Obama doesn’t mean it when he says he opposes gay marriage, and Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton probably don’t. But Obama has spoken eloquently about why he opposes same-sex marriage:

• “I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture.” (The Audacity of Hope, 2006)

• “I don’t think marriage is a civil right.” (10/26/2004)

• “I believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God is in the mix.” (8/17/2008)

• “Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.” (6/28/06)

These are not the words of someone taking a position out of political expediency. Just because Obama opposed Proposition 8 (as I did, by the way) doesn’t mean he supports gay marriage. Call me naive, but I think Obama means it. I really think his position on marriage and my position on marriage are not that far off.

Now, if someday we find out that Obama has been a secret SSM supporter all along, he’s still got my respect for expressing what I think about marriage better than I ever could.

This piece appeared in the Jerusalem Post and the San Francisco Sentinel December 10 of last year. I thought I would post it (and in coming days, other things I wrote after July 13 when the blog went on hiatus) in case people would like to see what I was doing when not blogging.

Some excerpts:

Just as many Jews tend to gravitate to liberal positions on a variety of issues, the segment of the Jewish community favoring same-sex marriage has grown larger and louder in the past few years.

That’s unfortunate, because if any issue has a “Jewish view,” it’s this one, and that view opposes redefining marriage.

Some reasons:

• First and foremost, same-sex marriage is against Jewish law. “So what?” many have argued, “we don’t try to ban pork or outlaw spending money on Shabbat.” But unlike those two transgressions, the prohibition of same-sex marriages – both religious and civil – is a Noahide law, as explained in the Talmud (Masechet Hullin). That means the ban on same-sex marriage, like the bans on adultery and murder, also apply to non-Jews. We therefore have a strong interest in rejecting such nuptials, regardless of the religion of the participants.

Even the increasingly liberal Conservative movement is on the record favoring man-woman marriage. Every paper on homosexuality ever passed by that movement’s Law Committee has either rejected same-sex marriage or taken no stance on it. Every paper embracing same-sex marriage has been voted down.

Rather than accusing people who support the traditional definition of marriage of imposing Jewish law on people of other faiths, it’s more useful to understand that support as an attempt to get the US government to reflect our values, which people on every side of every issue try to do all the time.

Also:

• Same-sex marriage hurts children. Gays can be wonderful parents, but children whenever possible should have both a mother and a father. Think of it this way: A lesbian can be a very good mother, but she cannot be a good father. Jewish tradition specifies different roles for mothers and fathers. For example, the Talmud states that a father should teach his child to swim. The Midrash says mothers should introduce their children to Torah. There are also intangible notions of what it means for a girl to become a woman, and how a man should treat a woman, for example, that one learns best from one’s mother and father.

However, under same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and California, legislatures and courts have required adoption agencies and fertility doctors to ignore whether a family provides both a mother and a father in providing services. In Massachusetts, in fact, if an adoption agency gives mother-father families even a slight tiebreaker preference, it faces being shut down by the government.

The more same-sex marriage succeeds, the quicker the idea will take hold throughout the government and society that favoring man-woman marriage is a kind of bigotry akin to racism. Teachers will be punished if they teach that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. Students who express distaste for same-sex marriage and state that they only want an opposite-sex spouse may even be reprimanded for being closed-minded.

I know that liberal Jews in particular are unlikely to be persuaded by some of the arguments above. But I hope everyone can agree that they are legitimate arguments, and that those of us who agree with Judaism’s prescription for man-woman marriage are not narrow-minded bigots trying to make gays into second-class citizens. Rather, we are individuals using our free-speech rights and our votes to help shape a society that is consistent with our values.

 

Why did African-Americans vote so heavily (70 percent) for Proposition 8 in California? It’s been suggested that the reason is because blacks are more religious and church-oriented than whites. Yet the NAACP is pro-choice, as are many blacks (certainly more than 30 percent). African-Americans are overwhelmingly liberal on most issues (gay marriage and school choice are the two exceptions I can think of) so there has to be a reason beyond “religious” to explain the lopsided black vote for Prop. 8.

It’s also been suggested that African-Americans were rejecting the civil-rights rhetoric of the “No on 8″ campaign, and taking a stand that gay-marriage isn’t a civil rights issue in any way comparable to the African-American freedom struggle. I like that explanation, but doubt it was wholly responsible for such a large swing in the black vote against the standard liberal position.

So why didn’t blacks support gays, their erstwhile allies, in California in November? The floor is open for discussion.