I am saddened that Richard Grennell, Mitt Romney's foreign policy spokesman, resigned over what the press is saying was pressure from the far right because he is openly gay. Who cares? He had a distinguished career as a spokesman for four United Nations Ambassadors and was widely respected. It is particularly disconcerting to learn that religious groups criticized Romney for appointing him due to his homosexuality.
As an Orthodox rabbi with a gay Orthodox Jewish brother, I have endeavored mightily to reconcile the dictates of my faith with the most human, loving and respectful approach to homosexuality. I have counseled hundreds of gay men and women of faith who seek to find their place in G-d's love amid a gay lifestyle.
But such efforts at reconciliation are undone by the gratuitous hate-filled bigotry of people like Dan Savage whose response to prejudice against gays is to offer insulting and degrading prejudices against religion. Just what Savage felt he was accomplishing by irresponsibly using obscenities about the Bible at a journalism conference for high school students is beyond me. But what I do know is that the answers to homosexuality and faith do no lie either with religious haters like Fred Phelps who insult G-d by hating gays, nor with secular fanatics like Dan Savage who insult homosexuals by falsely portraying them as angry bigots.
Everywhere we look today we find fanatics. So often we blame religion for all the extremists. But there are plenty of secular fanatics as well. From Savage's offensive attack against the Bible and religion in front of high school students, he appears to be one of them. I am prepared to accept that he has been misportrayed. But then let him retract and apologize for his remarks.
The Bible he assails is responsible for Western society's most cherished values. It has given us the Ten Commandments, and thus morality. The belief that every human being is created in the image of G-d, and thus the infinite worth of the individual person. The crushing of Egyptian tyranny, and thus the insistence that despots must be deposed. The Messianic idea of directional history, and thus the ideal of human progress.
That does not mean that there aren't aspects of the Bible that people will find unacceptable or objectionable. They have every right to disagree. But doing so while respecting people of faith is the way of the gentleman.
Once, I was sitting with my brother at a kosher restaurant in Manhattan when a religious man walked over and told me I was a dog. I asked him why the insult? He said because he read about how I defend homosexuals in the Jewish community. Ironically, he had no idea that my brother was sitting at the table with me. I thought to myself, "If I'm one step removed and I get attacked like this, how much hatred has my brother endured? How many times has he heard things like this?"
Do we gain anything by having the Dan Savages of this world demonstrate that they can give as good as they get? If Savage savages the Bible, has he struck a blow for his gay brethren, or has he just inflamed the discourse?
I receive a steady stream of sad and tragic e-mails from gay Orthodox Jewish men women who speak of their desire to be dead, or worse, to take their own lives. They have few to whom they can turn. They wonder how they can accept their natural sexual feelings amid their commitment to their faith. But they are committed to faith. They're not looking to be detached but rather to fit in. They do not identify with religion haters like Dan Savage because they love their religion. They are simply looking for their place within their faith and they are devastated to feel condemned by their own communities.
There is no question that we need a new religious approach to Biblical approach to homosexuality. I suggest this.
The Bible consists of 613 commandments, one of which is for a man to marry and have children, and the other is for a man to avoid gay sex with another man. That leaves 611 commandments for gay men to observe. That should keep them pretty busy. Homosexuality should be treated like lighting fire on the Sabbath or eating non-kosher foods, both Biblical prohibitions. Eating shellfish carries the same appellation of "abomination" as homosexuality. Moreover, as I have written at length elsewhere the prohibition of homosexuality is not a moral sin but a religious sin, akin to, say, eating on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as there is no injured innocent party.
Why we have all chosen homosexuality as the worst sin in the Bible, going so far as to distance homosexuals from their own faith, is beyond me. Some say the reason is because of the word "abomination." Little do they realize the word appears 104 times in the Bible, as I wrote in a recent column analyzing the word and its usage both in the Torah and the New Testament. So there are human approaches to homosexuality that seek to reconcile gay men and women of faith and the Bible. Savage's attacks on the Bible are utterly unhelpful.
But such extreme positions seem to be a hallmark of Savage's thought. A few years ago the New York Times Magazine did a cover story about Savage's ideas of how infidelity just might save monogamy, the idea being that monogamy is tough and it's about time we acknowledged it. Savage argued that couples should be far more understanding of infidelities and even discuss them before they happen so as to receive each other's informed consent, should that prove appropriate to the relationship. Couples should trade in the straightjacket of strict monogamy, which essentially doesn't work, and instead seek to be monogom-ish, that is, being essentially faithful but allowing for outside liaisons which just might prevent the dissolution of the primary relationship.
To be sure, the argument for open relationships goes back to the beginning of time, its most famous modern advocate being the celebrated British philosopher Bertrand Russell who wrote long letters to his wife about his consensual infidelities. But his open-mindedness could not surmount his jealousy when his own wife started taking lovers. When Dora had a child by another man, he left her, later commenting, "My capacity for forgiveness, and what might be called Christian love, was not equal to the demands I was making on it ... I was blinded by theory." Their daughter Kathleen Tait pithily remarked about her parents' strange marriage, "Calling jealousy deplorable had not freed them from it ... both found it hard to admit that the ideal had been destroyed by the old-fashioned evils of jealousy and infidelity."
The great British writer Iris Murdoch was the same. Her husband John Bayley wrote a memoir of their 40-year marriage called "Elegy for Iris." He explains that his wife would not allow her marriage to curtail her freedom or her need for adventure. She insisted by being allowed to have lovers and pursued other men intermittently. Still, she wished to be married because she desired the comfort, companionship and sense of safety that marriage offered. Bayley was not happy with the arrangement but felt he had no right to object. "In the early days, I always thought it would be vulgar -- as well as not my place -- to give any indications of jealousy..." So he buried the terrible pain it caused him all in the name of relationship enlightenment.
But convinced he has actually stumbled on something novel, Savage argued that we have crippled men by expecting them to be monogamous. "The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey." The New York Times added Savage's belief that "the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women 'the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,' we extended to men the confines women had always endured. 'And it's been a disaster for marriage.'"
Here is where we see how badly society needs the values of the Bible as opposed to the advice of Dan Savage. Has Savage discussed his theory with women? Does the average wife believe that her husband ought to have "a release valve" (I love these plumbing metaphors) that is not her? I counsel thousands of people. I know the answer is an emphatic no.
Yes, monogamy may be challenging and does not come naturally. But neither does studying for an SAT, waking up at the crack of dawn to do a job, or even remaining hygienic, for that matter. I suppose that cave men probably did far more of what came naturally. No doubt bopping a woman over the head with a club and taking her by force came much more naturally that having to wine and dine her, slowly wooing the commitment from her. But the Bible's introduction of the rules of relationships, like the need to marry and remain devoted, avoiding adultery, protected women from precisely this kind of abuse on the part of men. Today, because of the Bible's insistence on the holiness of matrimony, we expect men to try and live honorably and live by their commitments. And the first commitment a man makes in marriage is to treat his wife like she is special, loved, and the one and only. And when a husband has sex with another woman, whatever Dan Savage thinks, it makes her feel discarded, secondary and useless.
Dan Savage might say this is inevitable, that men are hard-wired to require lots of different women. I've heard these arguments ad nauseam from hard-core evolutionists who tell us that men are genetically wired to inseminate everything with a pulse.
I'm sorry. We men are human, not brutes. Our actions are under our control. And if we screw up we cannot blame our nature but rather our bad choices. Period.
Men, like women, are intimacy seekers. The men whom I know who had affairs had them primarily to find someone who made them feel good about themselves, made them feel desirable. Men cheat out of a sense of brokenness. That's why the most common refrain among married men to their mistresses is, "My wife doesn't understand me." And he thinks that some other woman would, when all along he could have made the effort to open up emotionally to his wife and find new erotic opportunities, and the feeling that he is a success, within the confines of marriage and monogamy.
But advice givers like Dan Savage do their readers an injustice when they allow men to devolve back into the bad behavior that has all too long characterized the male species. They likewise do a disservice when rage at the Bible in front of impressionable youth rather than promoting further harmony between religion and reason, faith and modernity.
Shmuley Boteach, "America's Rabbi", is the international best-selling author of 27 books and has just published Kosher Jesus. He is currently running for Congress from New Jersey's Ninth District. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley. His website is www.shmuleyforcongress.com.
Written in memory of Machla Dabakarov, the mother of a dear friend of Rabbi Shmuley, who passed away last year.
Follow Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RabbiShmuley
Rick Lowery, Ph.D.: The Bible and Marriage Equality
The people who walked out of the auditorium might have been walking away because of the offensive language Dan used. They also might have left because they didn't want to hear a persuasive, factual argument that the bible is full of contradictions and inaccuracies, and cannot be taken literally as a whole. The Christians who walked out want to believe in their version of Christianity, regardless of truth or the living example of Jesus Christ. Everyone is talking about the language Dan Savage used, but no one is saying the sustance of his speech was inaccurate.
If Christians don't want to hear secular criticism of the Bible, they shouldn't bring religious issues to the public policy forum. You can't have it both ways.
It instructs, for example, that gays should be murdered. That's not one of the fuzzy grey parts-it says it straight out. Same for Wiccans, by the way.
Most of the Ten Commandments deal either with dead-obvious things that civilizations long before the Bible had as rules (don't kill people, don't murder them), or particular aspects of the religion that have no purpose (don't work on Sunday, worship only one god). The Enlightenment, not the Bible, is the foundation of our morality and liberal civilization. It's done more good in a few centuries than the Bible did in over a millennium.
Leave off this "you can't be good without a god" bit. Yes you can, and generally speaking, we're much the better for it.
As far as I am concerned, the answers to homosexuality don't even belong to faith. Faith has merely appropriated the issue, claiming knowledge where it has only ignorance, authority where it has merely prejudice, and experience where it has an echo-chamber. Faith has claimed that this is about "sincere religious belief" and "God's will", much the same as it claimed about 2500 years of sexism, 2000 years of anti-Semitism, 1000 years of anti-Islam joyrides, 500 years of witch burning, 400 years of slavery, and 150 years of Jim Crow. Why am I supposed to believe that "the faithful" finally have it right on THIS subject, especially when they so clearly DON'T?
In each case, faith has progressed only when dragged forward by people like Dan Savage.
The second failure, the source of this obtuseness, lies here: the failure to reconcile and resolve what their religion says, what their own issues on this durable prejudice might be, and what basic humanity, common sense, compassion and morality say. You see, frankly, I don't think you even believe your own religion on this subject, because one of those Levitical passages clearly prescribes the death penalty for what you are calling homosexuality. You have rejected that little tidbit, clearly elevating your basic decency over the religious beliefs you claim, and by extension, the God you serve. I mean no blasphemy here, but if this is indeed the case, you're demonstrating that you are far more a moral being than He is. I would prefer to believe it is a bad, misused translation, than to believe that the Fount of Morality is immoral.
Dan Savage doesn't hate either religion or religious people. He hates religious hypocrisy, of which the complaints against him are an unfounded and softly spoken example. He hates the very idea that religion has been used as a club for 2000 years against gay people, as it has against the Jews. In my youth, and occasionally still, I commonly heard anti-Semitic slanders passed off as mere conventional wisdom. For my whole life, for 62 years, I have listened to the so-called religious "quote" their bibles, whether New or Old Testament, twisting vague, badly translated passages into book-length diatribes that call my very existence a threat to marriage, family, children, faith, liberty, western civilization, and humanity itself. They use the "Word of God" to justify what cannot be justified by any other means, INCLUDING the "Word of God."
Are we supposed to smile indulgently at that, politely point out that maybe, perhaps, if it's not too much trouble, you might want to possibly reconsider that remark? Those days are gone. You might even say, "NEVER AGAIN!"
Here is my issue with this article, and so many other articles that you write. Plainly, right wing Christians interpret scripture in a manner abhorent to the way traditional Judaism interprets it. Thus, homosexuals are abused and discriminated against, in the mistaken interpretation that homosexuality is more sinful than eating pork. Similarly, abortion is condemned as sin, even though it is permitted in scripture and Judaism. We see these issues tear our country and the lives of it's citizens apart... And yet, you do nothing to push back on these horrendous and cruel misinterpretations of scripture. Nothing!
Instead, we get from you articles condemning Savage, or Hillary Rosen, or whoever is speaking up against the vicious right wing. You offer only a few words that suggest the right wing Christians are incorrect, and then turn around and embrace the right wing, run as a Republican, etc.
Why stir the pot when it has already been stirred?
Love makes no distinction and even transcends the Torah.
Now then, will it surprise you to learn that this outrageous idea is just part of the so-called "morality" that the Bible offers in the Old Testament?
Deuteronomy 13
If thou shalt hear tell concerning one of thy cities, which the LORD thy God giveth thee to dwell there, saying: 'Certain base fellows are gone out from the midst of thee, and have drawn away the inhabitants of their city, saying: Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known'; then shalt thou inquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in the midst of thee; thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/e/et/et0513.htm
The Old Testament stands in complete opposition to our concepts of human rights and human equality. It condones mass murder and slavery and all manner of atrocious punishments.
First of all, there is no concept of freedom of speech or freedom of belief to be found in the Old Testament.
Deuteronomy 13:6-11:
"If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, 'Let us go and worship other gods' (gods that neither you nor your fathers have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone him to death, because he tried to turn you away from the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again."
And the children of Israel took captive the women of Midian and their little ones; and all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods, they took for a prey. And all their cities in the places wherein they dwelt, and all their encampments, they burnt with fire. And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of man and of beast. And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses, and unto Eleazar the priest, and unto the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the camp... And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp. And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, the captains of thousands and the captains of hundreds, who came from the service of the war. And Moses said unto them:
'Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to revolt so as to break faith with the LORD in the matter of Peor, and so the plague was among the congregation of the LORD.
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.'