Q&A: Equal Rights for LGBT People
Equal Rights for LGBT People
Question
Is the Rabbi’s position—that equal rights should be given to LGBT people—a pragmatic position or a value-based one?
I would appreciate an explanation.
Answer
It is a value-based position. I advocate a broad basket of values: the religious, the moral, and the democratic-liberal. Even if there is a conflict between them, that does not mean one cannot hold all of them at once. Therefore, from my perspective, LGBT conduct is a prohibition in Jewish law, and on the religious plane I oppose it. But on the moral-liberal plane I support granting equal rights to everyone. More generally, I would not want the state to intervene in values either (in the terminology of that column: I support a secular state in the thin sense).
That is also why I support opening the marriage market to everyone, even though on the religious plane I of course support religious marriage in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel. But the state is not supposed to dictate this to all citizens. Not only pragmatically, but also as a matter of principle. There is value in autonomy, that a person should do what he understands to be right.
To sharpen the point, I will repeat the worn-out chocolate example. A person may support eating chocolate because it is tasty and oppose it because it is fattening. He endorses both arguments at once, and the bottom-line decision is a balancing of the two (and as for that balancing, he must decide separately).
Yaakov wrote:
I’m not sure I understood the connection between the chocolate example and the issue at hand. With chocolate there are two different considerations directed toward the same thing (that is, eating it). In the matter of LGBT issues and civil marriage, we are dealing with different matters (the person’s act and the intervention of the establishment, if I understood correctly). In other words, this is not a real conflict; these are different questions. Can this value-based duality (or breadth) also be applied in a head-on contradiction (like chocolate)? I’ll try to explain what I mean. The Rabbi here distinguishes (again, if I understood correctly) between the personal judgment of such-and-such an act and the need for institutional intervention (or personal intervention, since I see no reason to distinguish between them, in my humble opinion, based on the given set of assumptions), by using the value of personal autonomy, a value that apparently belongs to the basket of democratic-liberal values. But it seems to me that even within the two aspects that were created (personal judgment and institutional coercion), there is a contradiction between the two different value systems. Opposed to the negative halakhic judgment toward LGBT people stands the sympathetic judgment of liberal morality, which advocates self-realization (or something like that). And opposed to the liberal position, which sees value in personal autonomy, the religious position דווקא sees a need, at times, to break personal autonomy and compel people to do things against their beliefs (or punish them for certain behaviors and thereby actually cause them to refrain from carrying them out). Can one also here, where the value contradiction is frontal, maintain both value systems?
My reply:
Indeed, with chocolate there are two different considerations regarding the same matter, and therefore it is only a borrowed example. What I meant was that I make this distinction both with respect to the values themselves and with respect to coercing them. Even if Jewish law instructs coercion in matters of values, I oppose the democratic state doing that. Halakhic coercion can come up for discussion when there is a state of Jewish law here (and that would require the citizens’ consent and halakhic commitment on everyone’s part). In general, it is not right to coerce someone who does not accept the system. Coercion is relevant only for someone who believes in the system and sins because of his evil inclination. It is a bit hard to determine what my position would be in a state of Jewish law, because that is a utopian situation and one would have to experience it and understand it when formulating a position within its framework, but it is possible that even within the framework of a state of Jewish law I would oppose coercion because of a moral consideration, while at the same time understanding that Jewish law instructs coercion on the halakhic plane. It is possible that I would find myself in a conflict like the chocolate case. But this is a completely hypothetical discussion, and it is not worth conducting it.