Q:
Who decided that Jewish gays, gays who might possibly even study Torah, are more deserving of our insults than Jewish thieves or Jewish ignorami or Jews who don’t observe kashrus or Shabbos? And why are they less welcomed into the Orthodox synagogue than other sinners?
A:
Why are Jewish gays less welcome than others into the Orthodox synagogue?
But before we go on, we have to make one little correction. “Gays who study Torah.” Gays don’t study Torah. It’s the same as saying that a mafia man is sitting and studying Mesilas Yesharim and shedding tears in his love of Hakadosh Baruch Hu and in his yearning to come closer to him. In the meantime, he’s shoving in some slugs in his automatic and getting ready to go out for business.
And the mafia man is closer to the Mesilas Yesharim than the gay is close to Torah. Torah and gay are two extremes. If you open the Torah, the Torah says that anybody who commits homosexuality should be put to death. And it states that the death is skilah, which means the most extreme form of capital punishment. So a gay is not going to study that. And if he does study it, it’s only for the purpose of speaking against it, not for the purpose of respecting it. So therefore, gays and Torah have no connection at all.
Now to the question itself. There are two levels of human behavior. I’m speaking now in general. One is a ritual level, a Torah level; it depends on technicalities that are taught to you in Torah. They are holy technicalities. It’s kedushah. It’s kodesh kedoshim. These are the mitzvos of the Torah. Without the Torah, you wouldn’t know about them at all. Many things; you wouldn’t know about tefillin without Torah. You might not even know about Shabbos without Torah. That’s one level.
There’s another level that has nothing to do with Torah, but it has to do with human reason. And that is a level of common sense behavior that mankind in its entirety has followed from the beginning of history.
Nations without Torah have abhorred homosexuality because it’s not the practice of nature. The practice of nature is that men and women live together. That’s what nature commands. There are certain dictates of nature too.
Homosexuality is an artificial attitude because people are seeking ways of stirring, of inciting their low passions beyond normal ways. So these people are not only immoral. They’re immoral among the immoral. So if you would go, let’s say, into a low dive where you find criminals who have wicked women with them, these people at least are living on a certain level of civilization. It’s a wicked low level. But lower than them are the homosexuals because they have manufactured an artificial form of wickedness against nature.
If nature had had such a phenomena, let’s say if dogs were homosexual or cats – wherever you look in nature, there’s no such thing. So we see it’s against the plan of nature, which means it’s against the plan of common sense.
Now people shouldn’t even yield to natural lusts. You can’t yield to your natural desires. That’s also civilization. Human beings are not animals. But when a person sinks to a level beneath that of an animal and commits unnatural acts – and not only that, but he wants it to be publicly accepted and he wants to have the right to teach it to other people too – that’s what they want now – so therefore they become enemies of the public welfare and they are more dangerous to the public than Nazis are.
You have to realize that. The Nazis understood that homosexuals are dangerous to the nation. And among the people that were sent to concentration camps were the homosexuals. They had pink slips. The pink slip meant ‘homosexual’. And he was also destroyed.
Now why did the Nazis do that? Nazis weren’t interested in morality. But Nazis were interested that society should exist.
The Communists also discourage homosexuality. You couldn’t have homosexual parades in Moscow. It’s out of the question. Why don’t they? They don’t believe in G-d.
The answer is, but they believe in society at least. And homosexuality means the destruction of society. Society has to function. There must be family! Otherwise mankind becomes a conglomeration of criminals. There must be a husband and a wife. There have to be children with parents. Parents control children. Husbands and wives have a certain control over each other. The home, it’s a unit. That’s the building block of society. But when you break that down, it means you’re making a society that has no cohesion. Each individual lives just for himself and it can cause any form of wickedness. You can’t even dream how far the wickedness of homosexuality can spread because it’s against nature. Anything that’s against nature is dangerous to society.
Now the Nazis were not against nature. Nazis were extremely wicked, but they believed in a society. The Communists are extremely wicked – not as bad as the Nazis, but they are very wicked – but they believe in a society. And those who are undermining society, they’re the enemies of all mankind.
(July 1979)
