Friday, February 5, 2010

1000 Rabbis CAN be wrong

OK, I'll freely admit that this one is some self-righteous, self-affirming, fish-in-a-barrel type stuff, but when 1000 Rabbis decide to speak for the rest of us, and predict divine retribution for daring to allow gays to openly serve in the military, then it seems incumbent on the rest of us in the Rabbinic world to say something:

When Americans are suffering economically and millions need jobs, it’s shocking that the Administration is focused on its ultra-liberal militantly homosexualist agenda forcing the highlighting of homosexuals and homosexuality on an unwilling military. This is the equivalent of the spiritual rape of our military to satisfy the most extreme and selfish cadre of President Obama’s kooky coalition.


That's me. Extreme, selfish and kooky. And proud.

We agree with Eileen Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness that this will hurt the cohesiveness of the military, cause many to leave the army, and dramatically lower the number of recruits, perhaps leading to the reinstatement of a compulsory draft.


You know, just like we predicted would happen with blacks. And women. Also, it's impossible to think that the military would benefit from having a larger pool from which to recruit at the exact same time that it's having trouble finding people willing to serve, right?

Thirteen months before 9/11, on the day New York City passed homosexual domestic partnership regulations, I joined a group of Rabbis at a City Hall prayer service, pleading with G-d not to visit disaster on the city of N.Y. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Chernobyl.


So, all of those other disasters were caused because the people in those places were too tolerant of gays, and therefore brought down God's wrath on themselves? I'm not even going to bother refuting the basic idea here, because if you do believe such things, then I don't think you're really open to rational arguments.

Let me take a deep breath, and pray that everyone remembers that you don't need to be a bigoted, backwards-thinking nincompoop to be a Rabbi. Even if 1000 Rabbis disagree with me on that one.

2 comments:

Phil Kent said...

Rabbi Rosenberg is, of course, 100 percent correct, but I imagine I'm preaching to the choir here. It doesn't matter how many "misguided" rabbis or others oppose ending the discriminatory don't ask, don't tell policy. it should be done away with and the military personnel should deal with it. I heard many soldiers on the radio today say that they would follow an order from the Commander in Chief. That, I hear is what they do. So, let the order issue doing away with this policy!

People, and this is what we're talking about here, people should be allowed to be who they are, wherever they are. To say that having gays openly serve their country in the military would destroy unit cohension and rain disaster upon us all is merely smoke and mirrors for outrageous bigotry.

The truth is bigots don't want to accept working alongside homosexuals. At the least, their fear and insecurity rule them; at worst, it is out-and-out insatiable hate. So they make up reasons why the policy should stay in place (and they make up policies to try to justify their bigotry and point to and say "Look, our discriminatory policy is working! Why end the discrimination?"). They ignore the simple fact that there actually are gay and lesbian soldiers already working just fine among them. They ignore that men and women of all sexual preferences are proud to serve their country and the common good. If we have a professional military, then it's well trained members will work together. The rest will display their ignorance and hatred, probably violently in many cases. It happened when we started to end segregation and, sadly, it will happen again now.

But it will take a lot more than 1000 rabbis, unfounded threats of divine retribution and ridiculous belittling of those who stand for justice to get in the way of the right thing to do.

LizStrom said...

I thought the benefit (or one of them) of being a Jew is that there is no official body or individual who speaks on behalf of all of us. As far as I'm concerned, these are just 1000 people with opinions, and they can't claim in any way to speak for the rest of us.