February 25, 2004
ARE WE ON CRAZY PILLS?:
Zero-sum game (Rabbi Avi Shafran, Feb. 25, 2004 , Jewish World Review)
The lesson of the Kempling case transcends its Canadian context; it is of no less import to Americans or Europeans. The issue of "gay rights" is not benign; the struggle between those who wish to make homosexuality acceptable as a normative lifestyle and those who do not is, simply put, a zero-sum game. To the degree that the gay movement's program is advanced, those who adhere to a traditional moral system will be not merely ignored, but vilified, demonized and penalized.That "gay rights" zero-sum truism is at the core of a legal brief recently submitted to the United States Supreme Court by the organization I am privileged to represent, Agudath Israel of America. We asked the Court to review and reverse a lower court's decision permitting the state of Connecticut to disqualify the Boy Scouts from inclusion on a list of charities to which state employees were encouraged to contribute. The reason the Boy Scouts were disqualified was the group's policy of not allowing homosexuals to serve as scoutmasters or in leadership positions
One of the brief's main points is that decisions like the lower court's patently malign traditional religious groups for their deeply-held beliefs. As The New York Sun noted in an editorial shortly after the Massachusetts Supreme Court's "same-sex marriage" ruling, "with a few exceptions, this cause [the acceptance of same-sex marriage] is being advanced through the denigration of Jews and Christians who adhere to the fundamentals of religious law."
The editorial went on to recount the reaction of "a friend" of the editorialist to the opposition to same-sex marriages asserted by "Agudath Israel and its Council of Torah Sages." Said the gentleman: "I see them as bigots..."
Similarly, an American Civil Liberties Union advertisement several years ago in The New York Times compared those who object on moral grounds to homosexuality as akin to vicious racists of yesteryear. Those who espouse a traditional view of acceptable sexual behavior, the ACLU asserted, seek "to hide behind morality." But, the ad continues, "we all know a bigot when we see one."
There's something seriously wrong with a culture in which heterosexualist bigotry is considered evil and homosexuality is not. The former is not a matter of hiding behind morality; the latter requires hiding from it. A decent society can afford some degree of tolerance towards homosexuals, because most of the damage and degradation they inflict is upon themselves and each other, but it must remain broadly intolerant of the behavior--precisely because we must care about such people even more than they care about themselves and must guard the culture from defining itself according to the proclivities of its most deviant members. There'll always be a new deviance just waiting to drag us further down into the slough of despond. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 25, 2004 9:33 AM
Seperation of church and state has been in some form part of the constitution since 1787 -- as a more benign form up until the 1960s, and more invasively since the 1962 ruling on school prayer. But until now, marriage has always been an excpetion to that. The institution was both one of the church and the state at the same time, because almost all mainstream religions and the government agreed on what marriage was.
What we're seeing now is basically a messy divorce between most churches and (as of now) a few states over just exactly what marriage is, and the word "marriage" itself has become the child caught up in the custody battle. Those seeking to extend the concept of marriage beyond the idea of a man and a woman are basically seeking custody rights for the term from those who hold that marriage is a religous-based institution, and subject to the laws of God handed down through the ages, and want to make the term as it applies within the state dominant, where marriage is a matter of law, and therefore, subject to change by man.
The problem with that, of course, is once you kick out the underpinnings of the concept, then marriage is nothing more solid than the designate hitter rule, something to be manipulated accoridng to whatever society's current political whim is. Supporters of gay marriage have tried to knock down protests on those type of objections as "straw men," and not germain to the debate. But then you run into this, posted on the NRO Corner website, from Jonathan Katz, executive coordinator of a gay and lesbian studies program at Yale University. He appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation, with Neal Conan and expressed the hope that gay marriage could change the meaning of marriage for everyone.
The quote, as recounted by Stanley Kurtz:
I'm also perhaps Pollyannaish enough to believe that we may, in fact, help move the state perspective on marriage by virtue of our inclusion towards a much broader, much more capacious view. I'm thinking even of the fact of monogamy, which is both one of the pillars of heterosexual marriage and perhaps its key source of trauma. Could it be that the inclusion of lesbian and gay same-sex marriage may, in fact, sort of de-center the notion of monogamy and allow the prospect that marriage need not be an exclusive sexual relationship among people? I think it's possible....I would never five years ago have defined myself as an advocate of marriage. In fact, the very institution smacked of precisely that which I lived my life in opposition to. But because it has cohered as perhaps the litmus test of civil rights now, because it carries real social benefits, and because I think it perhaps furthers the uncoupling of the state and the church in this country, which I thought was promised in our Constitution, then I'm all for it.
Based on that, you have a supporter of gay marraige hoping that the concept of fidelity can be removed from marriage itself. Given that attitude, how could anyone dispute that marriage between an adult and a child or between brother and sister, are any less viable concepts, so long as the society of that day deems it unobjectionable.
Posted by: John at February 25, 2004 3:26 PMThe original edict was simply that Congress shall make no law repecting an establishment of a religion. While it's true that does not directly equate to seperation of church and state, that's why I inferred the concept was handled passively until 1962, when Ms O'Hare's lawsuit worked its way though the court system, and the church/state divide concept took on an activist tone that has continued through the Massachusetts and California court rulings.
Posted by: at February 25, 2004 8:20 PMJohn:
That's absolutely true. Society DOES define what's objectionable, and what is not, and the definition changes over time.
There was a time when adults DID marry children, and that occurred in both Christian and Muslim societies, and no doubt also in other societies.
In fact, it's possible now, in certain circumstances, for adults to marry children in the US, if one defines fourteen year-olds as "children".
The history of polygamy/polyandry is ancient, and still practiced in parts of the world, as well as in the future of the US.
I don't know if they're allowed to marry, but in Sweden, adult brothers and sisters can legally have sex.
The bottom line is, what's currently legal and unobjectionable in the US is only a snapshot in time, and is bound to change. There's no compelling reason to believe that current arrangements are the best of all possible worlds.
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