As a follow up to my essay on defining homosexuality as a religiously moral issue, I thought it should write about what our attitudes should be towards homosexuals themselves, the acts of homosexuality, and about homosexual advocacy groups. First, in the interests of honesty, I must confess that I am repulsed by even the thought of the homosexual act. I don’t say I am correct to be repulsed... only that in fact I am. I think this is as much due to general cultural attitudes as it is to religious moral ones.
That being said, I think one has to understand that if an individual is attracted to members of their own sex, it is not something we should just condemn out of hand. It isn’t the impulse that is forbidden by the Torah. It is acting on the impulse that is forbidden. The Torah describes the act as a Toevah, an abomination. But I’m not exactly sure the adjective, Toevah, is part of the command. Perhaps the Torah only describes what our emotional reaction might be. But whether we are repulsed or not is not part of the Torah’s directive. The directive is not to commit the act.
So how should we look at our brethren who are plagued by such desires? The answer seems clear. We need to look at them as human beings no different than ourselves. We all can fall prey to forbidden desires. But Machshava Aino K’Maisah. The Torah does not punish thoughts, or deem them punishable. True, we are supposed to distance ourselves from obstacles which will generate forbidden thoughts but God did not mandate that our thoughts themselves be punished. So a homosexual individual who does not act on his inclinations can be as pure and holy as any heterosexual who does not act on his own forbidden inclinations.
What we do need to condemn is the act itself in a loud and clear voice. And we have to condemn any individual or group who promotes a homosexual lifestyle as merely an alternative but legitimate one. To that end, homosexual (gay) activists are to be fought at every juncture because their agenda is not about understanding the sexual nature of a given individual. It is about accepting the actual practice of homosexuality, not just the predilection to it. It is about the negation of a moral precept defined by God. In the end they are asserting man’s moral superiority over God’s. This is the true abomination. This is what the Hollywood agenda is and nothing less.
Does this mean that once a homosexual succumbs to his desires, that we reject him... throw him out of the Torah community? God forbid. There is no man who ever existed who did not sin. The homosexual act is but one sin. Serious though it may be, it is never-the-less only one sin. The Jewish people are full of iniquity. There are 613 ways to violate the Torah. I dare say all of us have violated a Halacha, unintentionally or on purpose. Just like none of us should be thrown out of the community for violating any Halacha, neither should anyone be thrown out for violating the “one” Halacha that the Torah calls an abomination. Teshuva should always be our first response to sinning. We must all work to correct our non-Halachic behavior. When is this not true? When the behavior stops being understood by the perpetrator as wrong and starts being advocated as a “right”. Such people are no different than any others who advocate violating Halacha.
There are many sincere people who try to re-interpret the Torah’s clear admonition against homosexual behavior as not really forbidding it. But sincerity alone does not make them right. These people too have to be fought. One cannot pervert the Torah’s clear admonition to refrain from an act that has death as its penalty... into a permissible act, just because they think the times demand it. ...or because they think they have a better understanding of what the Torah meant than the clearly obvious meaning which has been universally understood this way for all the millennia since Sinai whether by common man or by great Halachic authorities. These people, who are often rabbis of liberal streams of Judaism are the most dangerous of all because they claim to speak with a moral authority. But are they? Only if you believe in moral relativism and completely reject all Halachic literature on the subject published here-to-fore. This makes them very little short of Kofrim. They have to be fought every step of the way. Because even though America is not bound by Torah law, it is important that it be as close to Torah law through the Judeo-Christian ethic as we can make it. If America is allowed to continue defining deviancy down it will... whether Jew or Gentile... hurt us all.
