A Rabbi's Thoughts In Support of Gay Marriage

Through the Second Saturday Salon that meets in Ghent each month, I came to be on the e-mail address book of Rabbi Michael Lerner who supports gay marriage and who says that the Bible contains no bar to same sex marriage. I find his views interesting because - and this will shock the Christianists - the Old Testament and Leviticus belongs to the Jewish faith. They wrote it and the Christian Church commandeered it for their own. Here are highlights from an e-mail from Rabbi Learner:

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From the time I became a rabbi, I've been performing homosexual marriages in my synagogue, though with changes in the liturgy and ketuvah (they are not ke'dat moshe ve yisrael, but they are holy kiddushin and treated as such). For Torah literalists and fundamentalists, I argue in my book Jewish Renewal that what the fundamentalists fail to do is to read the actual literal words: that a man should not lie with a man the way that they lie with a woman. The words are striking because in the context all the other sexual commands do not qualify by saying "the way that x does y" but are simply categorical. But here there is no categorical prohibition, but only a prohibition on a certain way of being with a man. So I agree with Torah: men should lie with men in a different way than they lie with women, recognizing and honoring the uniqueness of that relationship. Jesus says nothing against homosexual acts. But Paul goes off against them, probably meaning the way homosexuality was being abused in Rome at the time. Nothing in the Hebrew bible prohibits gay marriage. And none of the religious texts prohibits lesbian marriages or affairs.

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There is, in my view, no legitimate reason why states should prohibit gay marriage. All the allegedly rational reasons are transparently phony--evidence that gay families do not do as good a job at raising children as heterosexual couples is scant, except for gay couples living in societal contexts where homophobia plays a shaping role in the lives of gay parents and their children. Most of the evidence I've seen shows the opposite--that homosexual families range from healthy to neurotic in precisely the same distribution as heterosexual families, usually facing the same severe problems that everyone has sustaining loving relationships in a society that privileges selfishness and materialism.

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There is no legitimate reason to deny homosexuals the same rights given to heterosexuals in any sphere, and that includes marriage. But denying those rights is precisely what Proposition 8 seeks to do.

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Rabbi Lerner can be contacted here: Rabbi Michael Lerner RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org