PART TWO: MY REASONING

Some people support gay rights in spite of their religious convictions. I support gay rights because of mine. This is why. I am Jewish, currently participating in the Reform Movement, but my reasoning also applies to Christians. I'm too poorly informed on Islam to include that here (except insofar as the Koran states that the Torah is valid which, oddly enough, it does).

 I've learned a lot from my religion. I'm supposed to love my neighbor. I'm supposed to do justice and love mercy (Micah). I'm supposed to be empathetic to the stranger and the slave, because I was both once. I'm not supposed to hurt people who haven't hurt anyone....but there's an exception, an exception involving those who participate in male homosexual conduct. (Lesbianism isn't actually addressed at all in the Bible, at least not in what Jews call Tanakh and Christians call the Old Testament.) I'm not completely sure why it's there and it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of what my religion teaches me but, unless I am ultimately rescued by what turns out to be a translation issue, there it is. I'd love there to be a translation issue but I can't count on that so I'm going to have to make my choice based on what's currently on the table.

One day I'll die and I envision having a conversation, a sort of exit interview, with God. On this issue, He'll ask me one of two questions:

1. "Why did you tolerate homosexuality when I expressly forbade it? Didn't you read?"

or

2. "Why did you tolerate the persecution of My children? Didn't you think?"

It gives "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" a whole new meaning.

How will I best be prepared for that conversation? How will I have lived my life most morally? On what basis do I make my choice?

What my choice really comes down to is whether I'm prepared to take the heat for being too compassionate or  too vigilant. To really be Jewish (or Christian, for that matter), you need both compassion and vigilance. Which takes priority? To me, the answer is obvious, though there are apparently many out there who would disagree with me based on their own conduct. It is this answer which ultimately drives my choice.

From what I can see in Judaism, compassion takes precedence. I base this on a lot. The Torah itself introduced an element of humaneness that I believe was unprecedented at the time. This humaneness isn't limited to people; a lot of it involves animals, everything from not overburdening them to feeding them before you feed yourself to not eating those that haven't been slaughtered humanely. Yes, there are a lot of rules, over six hundred of them, but they're only part of the story - a key part of understanding the moral center of Judaism has to do with the exceptions to the rules. Violating Sabbath is a big deal but, in order to save a life, violating Sabbath is not only permitted, it is obligatory. Fasting on Yom Kippur is required, unless you're sick, in which case it's forbidden. The rules that are most central, the Ten Commandments, are mainly about how to treat others (don't murder, steal from, lie about, or cheat on others, honor your parents) and yourself (you need rest - Sabbath) rather than about ritual.

The best answer to my question comes from the sage Hillel. When asked mockingly by someone to "teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot," he replied, without missing a beat: "That which is hateful to you do not do to another. The rest is commentary, now go study." He summed up our entire religion by going straight to compassion, bypassing even God. He doesn't talk about vigilance. This is pretty unambiguous.

Jesus, if anything, is even less ambiguous, because he makes the point that vigilance is less important than compassion explicitly, in a single amazingly elegant sentence:

Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone.

There are Christian clergymen who are now running around the world advocating the persecution of gays (like what just happened in Malawi). I'm a pretty intelligent guy but, try as I might, when I try to connect the man who gave us the above sentence with what they're preaching, I find I can't get there from here; I don't know how. Frankly, if they gave the same question serious thought, I suspect they wouldn't be able to either.

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That's my reason. I don't expect everyone looking at this question from a religious standpoint to agree with me because the prohibitions do after all exist. However, what the aforementioned clergymen are doing falls under a completely different category. That's not about faith; that's about having prejudices, finding some backup for those prejudices in Scripture, and going with it. That's just being bigoted and trying to force God to be their accomplice.

I think this because there is nothing in either Jewish or Christian scripture that supports this sort of emphasis. Yes, the Tanakh/Old Testament refers to (presumably) male homosexual congress as an Abomination; however, it also refers to eating shellfish as an Abomination (same word in the original Hebrew as well as English), and you don't see any of these guys suggesting long prison sentences for eating shrimp cocktail. One could, I suppose, make the case that sexual law is more important than dietary law (though I'm not sure on what basis). OK, let's use that standard: The prohibition of male homosexual congress doesn't show up in the Ten Commandments, unlike the prohibition of adultery, which does. This makes sense - adultery always entails at least one victim, while homosexual congress typically entails none. Adultery also involves the betrayal of a close and sacred relationship, which homosexual congress does not. Do you see these clergymen running around Africa or anywhere else saying we ought to put heavier penalties on adultery? Based on every standard except one, that would make more sense than what they're doing. The exceptional standard is the gross-out factor, the allegation that such conduct is unnatural (see Pt. 1 for my answer to that).

A good measure of the justness of any given policy or law is its objectivity. The gross-out factor is a completely subjective standard. That in itself is a great clue that we have an unjust policy here, with enforcement being driven by taste rather than law.

Are these stone-casting clergymen without sin? Didn't they read? Didn't they think?

The truth?

Probably neither.