Tag Archives: marriage equality

Don’t Touch the Hasids

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The torturously slow fight for marriage equality in New York State has been going on for the last week. There have been lots of rallies, pro and con.

Yesterday something interesting happened. State senator Ruben Diaz, the only Democrat to oppose equality, showed up at a rally with a bunch of anti-gay Hasidic Jews. Then suddenly Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the LGBT synagogue in New York City, appeared with her own pro-equality sign. A sign battle ensued for a few moments as each side tried to get their sign in front of the camera.

And then, for some reason, Rabbi Kleinbaum did something controversial: she put her arm around the shoulder of one of the Hasidic Jews. This is just not done. Hasidic Jews believe it’s wrong to physically touch people of the opposite sex other than your spouse.

Below is the video of what happened. For a moment the man did nothing; maybe it took him a few seconds to realize what was going on. But then he violently pulled away, as if he’d touched a pulsating pile of human brains, and he and his colleague ritually spit in Rabbi Kleinbaum’s direction and began shouting at her, “You are not a Jew!”

For some reason she seemed surprised that these guys were so upset. Come on, rabbi: you’re an expert on Judaism. How did you expect them to react?

I really don’t understand what her point was. Maybe she was trying to be friendly? At any rate, I think it was stupid of her to touch the guy. I don’t think she had any right to do so; would it have been proper to force feed him a ham sandwich?

And it undermines our message. One of the points of the marriage equality movement is that it is distinctly not about infringing on other people’s religious practices. Religion should not infringe upon the state, and vice versa. If marriage equality becomes law, Hasidic Jews and evangelical Christians will still have the right to refuse such marriages from taking place in their houses of worship; they will continue to have every right to practice their religion. They just won’t be permitted to make the rest of us practice it as well.

I can understand why some people might think it was okay for Kleinbaum to try to “teach the guy a lesson.” After all, Hasidic Judaism is homophobic and sexist; these men are trying to impose their beliefs on other people, and the imposition of their beliefs has harmful consequences for real-life couples and families; and they chose to protest in a secular location, and a crowded one at that, so they should have expected that they might accidentally touch someone of the opposite gender.

But Kleinbaum went out of her way to put her arm around the guy. She didn’t bump into him. She did it deliberately.

No, it’s not a terrible thing. But it wasn’t really necessary, either.

Obama and DOMA

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Matt has been bugging me to write something about the Obama administration’s decision to stop defending DOMA in court.

I just don’t consider it as big a deal as some other people seem to, for a few reasons.

One, contrary to what Newt Gingrich says, the administration is not suspending enforcement of the law. The law is still in place.

Two, we’re not talking about all of DOMA. We’re talking only about Section 3. If Section 3 is declared unconstitutional, the federal government has to recognize same-sex marriages performed in any state that allows them, but it doesn’t do anything about states that don’t allow them. Okay, that’s still a big step. But it’s not everything.

Three, the House can still step in to file a brief defending DOMA in court, and even if it doesn’t, independent organizations can always file amicus briefs putting forth their positions on the matter, and the court can take heed.

The ultimate decision-maker on this issue — barring DOMA repeal by Congress, which won’t happen anytime soon — will be the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court will do what the Supreme Court will do, no matter what any lawyer argues. It’s become a judicial cliché that Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the only one that matters, but in this case it’s true. Although Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor and Kagan were not on the Court the last time it decided a major gay rights case — Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 — we can be pretty sure where they’ll line up. Kennedy’s the wild card.

Yet in an intangible way, the administration’s decision is important. Obama is using the bully pulpit of the presidency to make a statement in favor of gay rights, and any time the topic is raised for debate, more people become convinced of the arguments in favor of equality.

It’s just a matter of time.

DADT Repeal

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In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that anti-sodomy laws were permissible under the U.S. Constitution. Seventeen years later, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled that travesty of justice.

In 1993, the “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy was instituted. Seventeen years later, Congress is about to repeal another injustice against gay Americans.

I can’t believe this is actually going to happen. Just over a week ago, DADT repeal seemed dead. The Republicans had blocked it not once, but twice. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman could have given up, but instead of just giving repeal their pro forma support and saying, “Sorry, we tried,” they actually worked to make it happen. A standalone bill seemed like a Hail Mary pass — there might not be enough time, and both the House and the Senate would have to pass it.

But it’s happening. At 3:00 p.m. today, the Senate will vote on the actual repeal bill, after 63 senators — including six Republicans — voted this morning to allow a simple majority up-or-down vote on repeal.

I don’t know if it’s significant that each of these mistakes — Bowers v. Hardwick and don’t ask/don’t tell — took the same amount of time, seventeen years, to reverse. Seventeen years is not quite a full generation, although it’s close: a gay person born in 1993 will be able to join the military as an openly gay American when he or she becomes a legal adult next year. Perhaps the seventeen-year time frame is just a coincidence.

What we do know is this: each step toward justice builds on the steps that came before. Before Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, being gay itself was practically a crime. In the 1990s, in a child custody case in Virginia, a judge ruled that a lesbian had no right to custody of her own child because Virginia’s anti-sodomy law made her a felon.

After Lawrence, such a ruling was no longer possible. Opponents of marriage equality can no longer use anti-sodomy laws to show that gay people are unfit to marry or raise children. A weapon in their arsenal was taken away.

And now the ban on gays in the military is about to be repealed. In and of itself, this is a wonderful thing and long overdue. But it will also give more ammunition to the fight for marriage equality. After all, how can you argue convincingly that someone who has served his or her country as a member of the U.S. military should not allowed to marry the person he or she loves, or is unfit to be a parent? We’ll see example after example of openly gay soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen and airwomen; we may not see tons of them right away, but we’ll begin to see more and more of them. Anti-gay bigots will start to see a mismatch between their own stereotyped preconceptions of gay people and the reality out there. A does not compute message will begin to form itself in their heads, and either they will change their minds or their heads will explode.

No victory stands alone. Each one is helped by previous victories and helps to create future victories. Our president likes to quote Dr. King: “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Each step nudges the trajectory a little bit more in the right direction.