Lobby group warns hate speech could lead to violence against homosexual community
Participants in Jerusalem’s Gay Pride Parade, August 2, 2018. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)
Close to 600 US and Canadian rabbis from across the spectrum of Judaism have signed a letter calling on Orthodox rabbis in Israel to retract a recent letter which described gay people as perverts who are striving to destroy the notion of family.
The document also urged the Israeli government to reverse recent legislation that excluded unmarried men from the right to father a child via surrogacy, and advocated greater separation of religion and state in Israel.
It was organized by A Wider Bridge, a San Francisco-based organization that focuses on ties between US and Israeli LGBTQ communities.
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“The enshrining of discrimination into law, and harmful words spoken by religious leaders, sow the seeds of hatred and brutality in the land, and put vulnerable members of Israeli society at risk of violence and worse,” the letter said.
“We call on the Israeli leadership to reverse its discriminatory policy in favor of equal rights for all citizens,” the document continued. “In calling for these rights, including surrogacy, we call on the Israeli leadership to reiterate the separation of religion and state as an ideal of democracy.”
“We, therefore, call on Israeli leaders and rabbis to retract these recent actions and return the State of Israel in T’shuvah [repentance], to this higher level of sanctity, dignity and safety,” the letter said.
Hundreds of signatures from rabbis representing Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish communities were collected since the letter was published last week, the organization said in a statement Tuesday.
At the end of last month some 200 Israeli Orthodox rabbis penned a letter that called homosexuals “perverts” and accused them of brainwashing the public. They were responding to criticism of Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Aryeh Stern, who had said homosexuals were “forbidden” and the children they raised had “very strange and unnatural lives.”
Referring to the annual gay pride parade in Jerusalem, the rabbis wrote that most Israelis “are shocked by the provocation and loss of way of the abomination groups.”
The rabbis also accused the LGBT rights groups of “aggressive terror accompanied by nonstop media brainwashing…[that] destroy the notion of a family and turn the perverts into heroes.”
Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, a board member of A Wider Bridge who drafted the US-Canadian letter, said that the Israeli rabbis were trying to undermine the safety of the gay community.
“By calling LGBTQ Jews ‘perverts’ [who are] condemning children to ‘wretched lives,’ these rabbis are endangering lives by laying the groundwork for violence against LGBTQ people in Israel,” Steinlauf said. “Their outrageous letter is a sign that they feel emboldened in their quest to roll back protections for LGBTQ people and other Israeli minorities.”
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Well it’s the same difference, except that these seem to be more homos in that collection than in the normal public…..like me…. –and you…. I suppose the “willowy” sort with the flexible wrists, are more prone to……(no pun intended)
I wonder how the word “Thespian” would sound if spoken with a heavy lisp….Hard to duplicate or imagine…
@ Edgar G.:
thespians.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I’m all for it….Who’s against it….? I was married myself, and since it took my mother-in-law 4 years to trap me into a corner, you could say that until then I’d been doing a bit of acting as well.
Why shouldn’t actors marry?
@ adamdalgliesh:
You are certainly correct in that only the modern West has legitimised lesbian marriage and I certainly agree that it shows a decaying of sociery. Many of the great ancient Empires were destroyed because they were eventually weakened by such behaviour, both male and female.
There are records, and I happened to remember reading a reprint of a very early book years ago, ( or maybe it was just a section of a book) which itemised quite a few trials of what they called” feminine sodomy”. Most countries didn’t take it seriously, although laws were made in many places against it. There were many books written (few in %age but many in numbers) about what they called “homoerotics”.It seems that the Nederlands took it more seriously and of over 200 trials for sodomy, more than 10 percent were of women, over a period of well over 100 years..
I also recall a case of two in lmedieval France where some noblewoman was convicted of sodomy with her friend. I can’t recall the details or names but it was sometime in the 1200s in Orleans. I think someone was burned at the stake for it.(or maybe that was in Spain..just not sure)
But definitely there WERE cases and the punishments show how illegal and obscene it was regarded as being.
But to have these sorts of male and female orgiasts “belly dancing” and gyrating down the streets of our Holy City, in fact in ANY Israeli city is a sin against Creation. Let the Goyim do what they want but should not interfere with our moral standards. I’m totally ashamed of the Jerusalem City Council. They don’t deserve to have attained such an elevated position, the most unique City in the whole world, steeped in sanctity for thousands of years.
@ Edgar G.: The legitimation of Homosexuality, and even so-called transsexuality, in the West is an unhealthy and bizarre development. Everyone knows that homosexuality is connected with serious diseases. Historically, there is no evidence of any previous society permitting marriage between people of the same sex. There is no evidence that anyone ever requested such a thing until a few years ago. A sure sign of a society in the last throws of disintegration and decay.
Israel’s rabbis are correct. The homosexuals are an abomination and an attack on the family.
These charlatans posing as rabbis are making an outrageous accusation when the homosexuals are the ones who are hostile to anyone who won’t cave in to their demands and give them special rights. If they were real rabbis, they would know that homosexuality is an abomination.
This “Pride” parade is an abomination. How dare these so-called rabbis talk about “violence” towards LGBT, when in fact these perverts openly, and with great public and government support, aggressively act against Torah teaching, destroy Jewish family, and harm our youth! Are we the Jews or what? Our Jewishness for thousands of years was based on Torah. Our ancestors could convert to Christianity or Islam and make their lives much easier, but they did not! They understood the wisdom of Torah and their mission, and were faithful to Hashem. Now, when Jews finally returned to Israel, this unbelievable, disgusting rally took place in the heart of Israel, in our holiest city – Jerusalem. It is simply heartbreaking! Times of Israel is a Lefty newspaper, not worth reading…
First of all the Rabbis Letter was organised by the San Francisco group, and considering that The Golden Gate City is the Capital of world-wide homosexuality, it’s already tainted. I see Tikkun Olom at the forefront here conveniently excluding, or ignoring sexual perversions.
Secondly the Israeli Rabbis are correct. Halacha is definite on this matter. So we have a mixed conglomeration of do-gooders, breaking with Halacha, through which, alone, Jews have survived under the most obscene persecution, for nearly 2000 years, until this day. The Reform and many of the Conservatives are the same, as many do not observe Halacha.
What brought all this about. One only has to be present–with a strong stomach– at a Gay Parade in Jerusalem, our Holiest of Holy Cities, to see the utter abandon with which the marchers, prancers, dancers, etc, display themselves in utter defiance of human decency. It should shame humanity itself.
It brings us back to some of the lewdest orgies that used to occasionally appear in Ancient Rome, the Bacchanalia, for example (although that was heterosexual,)
I don’t know how the Jerusalem Council ever permitted such a show of degradation through it’s city, even for the visiting dollars pouring in, with off-centre hedonists from all around the globe making our Holy City into a “den of iniquity”….. Besides strongly offending the Chachams, Zekenim, Haredim, Orthodox, and the Torah itself. as well as degrading the status of the City.
How inclusive do we have to BE, to show the Goyim we ARE. Are there NO limits….??