My Jewish Friend Supported Proposition 8 and John McCain [View All]

[davidlynch]

I have a buddy in the Jewish community that I meet with occasionally. When I first met him, he was secular (coming from a non-practicing Jewish family). Later, he married an Israeli wife, and soon he embarked on a serious study of Hebrew, the Torah and Talmud and became much more active in the Jewish community.

After many years, he is now a self-described Orthodox Jew, and he has worked very hard to embrace Judaism. He is constantly battling to achieve higher levels of faith and morality, and he has given me a glimpse into his fascinating world.

However, he and I recently had a disturbing debate. It started when he mentioned the ongoing protests in California pertaining to Proposition 8. He described the protesters as an “angry” mob and he feared that these “angry” people were on the verge of riot.

I learned that my friend supported California Proposition 8 and also that he voted for John McCain.

He also expressed extreme concerns regarding Obama’s victory, fearing that he might undermine Israel, although he does pray frequently that Obama will defy expectations, He takes absolutely no comfort in Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel. He asserted that Rahm has zero respect from insiders in the Jewish community, stating that they view Rahm as an apostate as evidenced by his involvement in politics, which they see as prima-facie proof of non-conformance with Judaic principles.

The fact that he kept using the word “angry” set off alarm bells in me, because it sounded like a right-wing talking point.

While I am normally careful to avoid such subjects, in this case I launched into an argument about how ironic it seemed to me that a Jewish person, a member of a community with such history of persecution, a community that professes to be trying to fix the world (Tikkun Olam – repair the universe) would be willing to support Proposition 8. I asked my friend to clearly explain why discriminating against gays in this manner is different from discriminating against any other group (e.g., Jews) to try to understand his point of view.

Homosexuality is an Abomination

Perhaps his most heartfelt point is that homosexuality is explicitly rejected by the Torah. This was his most visceral defense, and perhaps the key to understanding our disagreement.

While I see the Torah as a book of interesting and occasionally beautiful fictions, my friend takes it seriously.

I mentioned that the Torah also advises parents to stone their children to death for disobedience (Deuteronomy 21) but he countered that I was exaggerating the significance of that admonishment and that such passages had to be tempered with proper interpretation.

Although I didn’t mention this at the time, I believe that such selective interpretation of religious texts fuels misunderstandings. It is dangerous and can even exacerbate problems on a global scale.

Gays are Not a Persecuted Minority

My friend believes that gays are not actually a persecuted minority, so they don’t need the same types of legal protections applicable to races or sexes. He challenged me to recall any incident in which a gay that I knew personally was subject to overt persecution. I was unable to come up with a concrete example because most of my gay friends are powerful members of the community and aren’t persecuted per se (however, they may have personal stories of which I am unaware). This was a very important point to my friend, because he mentioned later that if he could be convinced that gays were in fact a persecuted minority it might change his personal feelings on this issue.

Gays Represent a Direct Threat to His Family

I asked the question why he would personally object when other people that love each other get married, regardless of their sexual preferences. For me, this is the most perplexing puzzle, because even if I were anti-gay, I cannot imagine caring so much about other peoples’ business. He said that gay marriage represented a direct threat to his family. I stress “direct” because I used the word “indirect” and he corrected me. He believes that his children might have to interact with the children of gay married couples, and he finds this intolerable.

Sexual Activity has an “Effect” at a Higher Spiritual Plane

My friend mentioned that when a man and a woman have sex, there is some event that occurs on a higher spiritual plane. He mentioned that when gays have sex, a similar event occurs, but with very negative consequences to some kind of spiritual fabric. I tried my best to keep from rolling my eyes on this point; it sounded like science fiction (“tearing the space-time continuum”). I replied something like “But what if one doesn’t believe in such a higher spiritual plane”, and he conceded that if you come from that point of view, that this point obviously doesn’t make much sense. Since I am a secular humanist, this point sounds like gibberish.

Gays Are Welcome to All Civil Rights – Just Not “Marriage”

We explored this definitional angle, where simply the word “marriage” becomes the key issue. Regarding this, I think that perhaps we found a little common ground because “marriage” clearly comes from religious traditions.

To my friend, gays being married are effectively thumbing their noses at this tradition.

Homosexuality is a Choice

On this issue, I feel like I made many points that were pretty hard to refute. I mentioned that homosexuality has always been with us, and can even be measured and studied in animals, where there is obviously no “learned” bias.

I asked my friend to explain why any sane person would voluntarily “choose” a sexual preference that was bound to stigmatize them in many ways, and expose them to such ongoing hardships (even hate and violence) in society. I also asked him to imagine a parallel universe in which it was normal to be gay, where heterosexuality was exceptional, and to ask him how he would feel if legislation were passed that prevented him from marrying his wife. I cannot remember his specific answers to these questions, he did say something about “people do crazy things for attention” or something like that, but frankly he wasn’t convincing and at that point I was somewhat agitated and having trouble taking his positions seriously.

The Conversation Breakdown

At this point, our conversation fell apart, because he sat back and said “You’re really coming down on me hard on this issue, you won’t let me speak and if you don’t, I’m just not going to talk about it any more.” On this, I think there may be some truth to it, because I was in full-blown debate mode. In some cases after I’d ask questions that were mostly rhetorical, he would hesitate, and I would say things like “see, you have no answer”. In other words, I was getting a little overheated and frenetic, but objectively I think that my conversation was still within the standards of decorum.

Jews Are Leaving the USA

One more disturbing subject came up when my friend mentioned that this whole issue is moot, and then dropped a bombshell. He mentioned that at least one million Orthodox Jews are seriously planning to leave the US and move to Israel, because they believe that the morality level in the US has dropped so low that it is essentially beyond repair.

He mentioned that Jews cannot continue to act as the world’s policemen, and that they’ve done everything to rescue the US from its moral transgressions without success.

I suddenly understood that, to him (and possibly the Jewish community at large), the way he felt about the election of Obama was tantamount to the way progressives would feel if McCain had won: the last straw and justification to leave this godforsaken country.

In my mind, I imagined a large swath of the San Fernando Valley suddenly up and leaving to Israel.

Why It Mattered To Me

In closing, I added that the reason that I felt the discussion so important, and why it had become so heated, was that I respected his efforts (and Jews in general) to achieve higher levels of morality.

In this, I saw support of Proposition 8 and support for McCain as an aberration, a mistake. I felt that someone so focused on morality, with knowledge of history, would clearly see the ironic implications of singling out any group for discrimination. The fact that my friend could not connect these dots was profoundly disturbing to me, and the possibility that his views might be just the tip of the iceberg has filled me with grief, driving me to write this post.

Request for Insight from Jewish DUers (or Friends Thereof)

If you are a non-practicing, liberal, conservative or orthodox Jew, or if you have friends that are, please post your observations on any of these points. Are my friend’s views unusual, or are they fairly representative of the Jewish community as a whole?

Thanks for taking the time to read and consider my post.