Love It or Hate It: Religious Streams Split over High Court’s Sodomy Ruling

For Rabbi Denise Eger, founder of the largely gay Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood, Calif., it was “a Shehecheyanu kind of day.”

Eger cited the Jewish prayer of thanksgiving on June 26, the day the U.S. Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, threw out state laws criminalizing gay and lesbian sex.

The ruling was a victory not only for gay and lesbian rights but for all Jews and Americans, Eger said.

“This is the gay version of Brown v. the Board of Education,” added Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of one of the nation’s largest gay synagogues, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York City, referring to a famous high court ruling against segregated schools.

“This is really a historic day. It’s a moment that’s one step farther out of Egypt and one step closer to the Promised Land.”

The June 26 landmark ruling barring states from policing private sexual behavior gave many gay and lesbian Jewish leaders an extra reason to celebrate Gay Pride Week in their congregations.

But some on the political right did not embrace the decision.

“What happened is the harbinger of challenges to laws that are designed to promote a vision of sexual morality,” warned David Zweibel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, a fervently Orthodox group.

“No matter what the court may say about the legality of consensual homosexual conduct, it doesn’t speak to the more important question of morality,” he said. “For those of us who take our guidance from the eternal source of morality, the Bible, we recognize that this type of conduct is sinful and therefore inappropriate.”

While those reactions reflected polar extremes in the Jewish community, many across the political and religious spectrum offered a more complex glimpse into the decision’s impact.

Perhaps nowhere is the ruling more relevant than in the Conservative movement, where some questioned the ruling’s effect on the debate raging over ordaining gay and lesbian rabbinical students and performing gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies.

Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the movement’s rabbinical union, said Conservatives have long backed rights to privacy and welcomed gays and lesbians in congregational life — but that gay and lesbian ordination and unions remain issues for the movement to tackle on a theological basis.

“Individuals in their private homes are entitled to freedoms without interference from police,” Meyers said, “though halachically our position is that homosexuality is not normative.”

The movement’s religious standards body, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, is to take up questions on gays and lesbians later this year.

Meyers said the panel does not act in response to “public pressure,” but he added, “I don’t believe halachic decisions are taking place in vacuums either. The rabbinate clearly understands where society is, what the pressure points are.”

But Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the University of Judaism’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles — who long has called to liberalize the movement’s standards on gays and lesbians — predicted the Supreme Court decision would not influence the law committee directly.

“This is not an issue of moral condemnation, this is an issue of how we understand the Torah,” he said.

To the left of that stance lie the more liberal streams, such as the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, which have approved the ordination of gay and lesbian rabbis and commitment ceremonies. The Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati this year accepted the nation’s first transgendered student, a woman now living as a man.

For these movements, the court case was not so much a theological breakthrough as a social turning point.

The ruling “represents a significant leap forward in the protection of the equal rights of gay and lesbian Americans and in the right to privacy for all,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Reform Religious Action Center in Washington.

For gay and lesbian rabbis, the court’s 6-3 ruling reversing its own 17-year-old decision upholding Georgia’s anti- sodomy laws signified a historic moment for gays, lesbians and Jews.

Kleinbaum, for example, said she was “horrified” that the court had cited Leviticus and its prohibition of homosexuality in the 1986 Georgia case, Bowers v. Hardwick.

“The court had used the language of the religious right to discriminate, and as a progressive religious person I had to object,” she said.

“All people are created in the image of God — kiddush hashem — and there’s no conditional clause saying, ‘only straight people,’ ” she said.

Kleinbaum also hoped the ruling would usher in full civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians — something Agudath Israel and one dissenting voice on the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia, warned against.

The religious commitment ceremonies she performs currently “have no legal benefits for the couple,” such as tax breaks or health benefits.

But Agudath Israel’s Zweibel felt otherwise.

“Stripping government of the right to legislate on the basis of community morals and standards could well lead down the road to invalidating other laws that reflect society’s abhorrence of other promiscuous behavior, such as prostitution, adultery, bigamy and incest,” he said.

Despite such misgivings, many gay and lesbian rabbis hailed the decision.

Rabbi Camille Angel of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, a largely gay and lesbian synagogue, called the ruling “one of the greatest decisions in my lifetime.”

“I can no longer be treated as a second-class citizen,” she said.

The mood at Sha’ar Zahav was “ecstatic,” she said.

Ironically, Angel said many congregants have grown somewhat complacent about gay and lesbian rights because they live in San Francisco, one of the nation’s gay and lesbian centers, and the synagogue’s contingent at the annual Gay Pride march has dwindled.

“We forget we’re living in a bubble,” she said. With the new ruling, she added, “it’s burst.”

Rabbi Joshua Lesser of Congregation Bet Haverim, a largely gay and lesbian synagogue in Atlanta, said the court also rendered a “big crack” in the notion that gays and lesbians are “less significant” because “of the people we choose to be with.”

It also signaled “a significant break” in the country’s Judeo-Christian ethic, he added.

“A traditional understanding of Leviticus is the most significant platform that gay-rights opponents have used to erode gay rights,” he said.

While Leviticus “is a legally based” argument for Jewish law, “there are Jewish values that infuse our entire understanding of the Torah that some would argue, as I would, are more important,” Lesser said.

Kol Ami’s Eger predicted the court’s opinion would bolster the notion that the Jewish community and the country at large must foster committed relationships and family values, regardless of people’s sexual orientation, as a way of building the Jewish world.

At Kol Ami, with 350 families including 100 children less than 16, commitment ceremonies are not uncommon, Sunday school is full and young gays and lesbians live in an era of high hopes.

“We have a baby boom. Young gay and lesbian couples are coming for commitment ceremonies. They expect to get married” once civil ceremonies are legalized “and have children — Jewish families,” Eger said. “When I look at population surveys, I don’t think we have any Jews to waste.”