California Proposition 8: Gay Marriage

I was reading a blog post praising the passage of proposition 8 (which, had I been able to vote in California, I would have opposed), which reminded me that I wanted to make a short comment about gay marriage - or more accurately about the state's position in marriage.

(UPDATED: You might want to take to look at this "bloggingheads.tv" discussion on the issue)

The issue of whether the state should allow two adults of the same sex to marry has been a social hot topic for several years. Various state courts have taken up the question as to whether their individual constitutions require such a provision. New Jersey's Supreme Court decision opted for a middle ground requiring that all of the benefits and obligations inherent in civil marriage must be extended to gay couples, but that the state need not call this "marriage." Instead, the state could call it a "civil union." When I asked then Attorney General Stuart Rabner what the legal difference was between "marriage" and "civil union" as a result of the court ruling, he replied "None." It is only a difference in name. Significantly, when Rabner issued his ruling that public officials who performed weddings could not refuse to perform gay weddings (all or nothing was the essential ruling), he exempted religious officials from that edict, thereby signaling the difference between state-sponsored marriages and those performed by a religious institution.

That short conversation and subsequent thinking led me to the conclusion that the state should remove itself entirely from the business of regulating "marriage." The state's business should be in creating the ability to enter into legal domestic arrangements that would, for the purpose of the state, be called "civil unions." Marriage would become the sole prerogative of each church, which could bestow the sanctification of marriage as the church saw fit. Churches (used inclusively to refer to all religious institutions) would be able to determine without any state interference whether to sanctify a particular union or not. The state would determine entirely independently of any church whether a domestic arrangement rose to the level of a civil union. The two would likely be similar in most cases, but they would not longer be tied together.

What would be the result of such a change? It would change the nature of the debate. Once the religious issue is separated from the civil issue, we can focus on other questions. Is promoting civil union in the interest of the state? I believe that it is. Our community benefits by stable family units that have predictable and defined rights and responsibilities to each other and the community. If that is the case, then promoting stable gay families is no less beneficial than promoting stable straight families. There are those who would argue that a gay couple is less capable of raising children than straight couples. While the welfare of children is certainly a central concern of the state, all evidence suggests that gay families are just as stable as heterosexual families. Other evidence suggests that having gay friends leads the rest of us to be more tolerant and open of all people, clearly a goal that the state should promote.

Most importantly, however, is the very idea of fairness. As state after state has done away with discriminatory practices against individuals who are gay, so should it do away with discrimination in this important area. Recognizing that the religious sphere, which can, sometimes of necessity, be discriminatory, should be protected from the interests of the state (the very basis of the separation of church and state), the state should relinquish its claim to "marry" people and instead focus on civil unions that promote the interests of the state.

Rahm Emmanuel - How will the Chareidim react?

We all know by now that Rahm Emmanuel is an observant Modern Orthodox Jew. What I did not know is that he is married to a convert. Shmarya Rosenberg in FailedMessiah.com writes "Emmanuel's wife is a convert, converted by Rabbi Lopatin. As things now stand, the new Chief of Staff is married to a woman Israel's Chief Rabbinate won't recognize as Jewish, even though her conversion was done by an Orthodox rabbi."

According to the Wikipedia on Rahm Emmanuel, his wife, Amy Rule, converted shortly before their marriage, presumably in order to marry him. So, wereRahm Emmanuel's children to choose to marry in Israel (they are young now and presumably this is not going to be a problem during the Obama years), how would the Rabbinate find its way to avoid the embarrassment that would certainly arise?

The Israeli Rabbinate is painting itself into a corner. Eventually, whether it is the Emmanuel family or some other prominent family, the Rabbinate is going to find that it has to come to grips with the fact that the Jewish family is not to neatly defined as they might wish.

The Chareidi Political Myth

Jonathan Rosenblum in Cross Currents rants about how the Mainstream Media (MSM) was so deeply in Obama's pocket that they tried to steal the election. The fact that there is a whole conservative media infrastructure (e..g., Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc) that provided its own perspective on the election seems to have escapted Rosenblum. As an aside, Rosenblum states:

Note to American Jews, who polls showed fleeing from the Republican ticket because of Palin’s presence: Continually giving expression to your loathing of devout Christians and expressing your worries that they are busy plotting the next pogram or the imposition of a Christian theocracy, on no evidence, is a pretty fair recipe for alienating Israel’s strongest supporters in the United States and creating anti-Semites where none were previously found.

As if the only reason that American Jews might have rejected Palin was her religion. Vice Presidential selections rarely have a substantial effect on a Presidential race, but in this case, polling data suggests that if Palin had any effect, it was a positive one. Reports the National Review

on balance, people who thought Palin's presence on the ticket was important were more likely to vote McCain by a significant margin.

The fact is that most American Jews, if they cared at all at Sarah Palin, were simply further swayed by McCain's appalling lack of sense in picking perhaps the least prepared women in the Republican party to be his running mate.

Rosenblum, who is one of the least myopic of the Chareidi commentators, is so incensed that his candidate lost, dismisses the possibility that Jews, like the majority of the American people, made a considered choice for broad, complex reasons. Ynetnews reports that 78% of American Jews voted for Obama, up 3% (within the margin of error) from those who voted for John Kerry. So, American Jews increased their support for Obama, in spite of the hateful smear campaign, to which Rosenblum contributed. Instead, American Jews were the one white group to overwhelmingly support Barack Obama, our next President.

Like so many American Jews, on election day and for the days since, I am proud to be both an American and a Jew.