World opinion must not figure into Israel’s decisions. Survival trumps political correctness.
Jerrold Terdiman, MD
Woodcliff Lake, NJ
Morality Wars
Rabbi and law professor Michael Broyde argues that the recent Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage has no real effect on Orthodox Jewry (“Religious Liberty Versus Legislative Morality,” op-ed, Aug. 14).
I believe all his arguments are correct but his conclusion is wrong.
If New Jersey had legalized gay marriage while New York had not, any gay couple would, presumably, have been able to take the PATH train across the Hudson River to get married in Jersey City. Yet that would not have stopped gay rights groups from strongly campaigning for a New York gay marriage law. That’s because the issue to them is not simply gay marriage but societal acceptance of gay sexuality as a legitimate lifestyle choice. The Supreme Court victory validated that view to some extent.
This same dynamic applies to many moral issues confronting observant Jews and religious conservatives of other faiths.
For example, we have in New York City the issue of topless painted women hanging out in Times Square, posing for pictures and asking for tips. Some of the complaints about this phenomenon concern the matter of people dressed as Elmo or Mickey posing for tips. Others complaints focus on the toplessness. But few if any of the complainants seem to question the New York State Supreme Court decision that said equal rights demand that if men can go topless, so can women.
The fact that newspapers insist on publishing front-page pictures of the women doesn’t seem to bother most people, but it is clearly an issue for any religious person walking past a newsstand. Why the newspapers insist on putting black bars across the women’s chests when they publish pictures of topless men without the black bars is a contradiction no one seems ready to explore. After all, equal should be equal.
And the fact that some female politicians strongly support a woman’s right to walk around topless but don’t seem eager, or even willing, to show up on the floor of the City Council topless on a hot summer day is another contradiction I don’t quite understand.
As in the case of gay marriage, the issue is not Times Square but rather the acceptance of public female toplessness, or near-toplessness, on public streets and maybe more so the idea that equality between men and women must equal sameness.
The problem goes deeper. The State University of New York came out with a new admissions form. The choices of gender – male or female – have been replaced with seven or eight different possibilities. That’s important because it says anything goes when it comes to gender. What it comes down to is whether each person has the right to sexually self-identify in whatever way he or she chooses and to dress (or undress) in any manner he or she prefers – or whether there are social, moral, and legal norms that need to be followed and that may constrain many people.
As one might expect, the feminist movement is divided, with some members of the sisterhood insisting that “women” are only those who were born, grew up, and suffered as women and that a man, no matter how many hormones he’s taken or how much surgery he’s undergone, is not a woman because he hasn’t shared in women’s suffering.
Other feminists strongly object to this discrimination against transgender people and argue that individuals can and should “self-identify” in any way they choose and that the rest of us should accept and acknowledge their choices.