East Village Mamele: America Must Listen to Some Rabbis Online Somewhere

The East Village Mamele is not happy with the voters of California, Arizona and Florida who have “voted to deny families this kind of joy.” What kind of joy is this? The kind of joy we all should recognize is both universal, urgent, and a basic human right. The joy of singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider at a gay wedding ceremony.

“It was more emotional than we expected,” reported my bro-in-law, as Shirley jabbered in the background. “It felt like a renewal of our earlier vows. And having Shirley running around us added to the emotion level.” They sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” during the ceremony, to keep Shirley interested. The justice of the peace sang along. Shirley danced with excitement.

However, this isn’t just about the opportunity for a kick-ass family party. Rather, the E.V. Mamele has another darned good reason for Americans to rethink their position on gay marriage.

There are so few moral slam-dunks in this world. I understand ambivalence about abortion. I get anxiety about affirmative action. But I simply do not understand how allowing other people legal and societal parity and the right to true love and family is any threat to straight people’s lives or marriages. In an election year in which “Yes, we can” carried the day, here was an initiative whose sole purpose was to say “No, you can’t.” And I don’t want to get into the biblical justification for intolerance. Rabbis and ethicists way smarter than I am have explained how to contextualize the who-can-lie-with-whom abomination thing. You could look it up.

I could look it up…and you could look up some rabbis who actually have a very different interpretation…but frankly, this issue should not be decided by rabbis. Even rabbis online.

Mamele also notes that,

In Newsweek last week, Anna Quindlen pointed out that the same confident “God doesn’t want this” and “this is unnatural” and “this will cause the breakdown of society” language was used about interracial marriage in the 1960s.

Now, I could give you some biologists to look up online in order to show you why this isn’t really the same, but that isn’t the point. Rather, bringing in racial segregation is a dubious stick with which to hit us holdouts on this issue. Overall, blacks clearly do not see these issues as analogous. And Jews have historically been all too prone to usurping the black Civil Rights movement for their own issues and and their own agenda.

This has incurred a lot of legitimate resentment. We need to stop doing that. It’s really obnoxious.