Balancing Orthodox Judaism and LGBT Inclusion
Balancing Orthodox Judaism and LGBT Inclusion
July 6, 2010
Rabbi Steven Greenberg
As an American Orthodox rabbi, I have a deep appreciation for the constitution's protections of my religious liberties. I do not want the government interfering in the workings of religious communities and am grateful for that firewall of protection. However, it is possible to employ these wise constitutional provisions in destructive ways, turning them into a cover for discrimination.
On June 18, Lynn Schusterman, the chair of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, wrote an opinion piece calling upon all Jewish organizations to more fully embrace the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in our community. She called for increased education about LGBT people. She asked that we become allies of equal rights, like the over 300 clergy who lobbied Congress with the Human Rights Campaign last year, advocating hate crimes and employment non-discrimination laws. Most importantly, she encouraged organizations to adopt non-discrimination policies that include the LGBT community. And notably, she indicated that the Schusterman Foundation would only support organizations that maintain such policies.
As a gay man, I was deeply moved by Schusterman’s article. To see a respected and accomplished Jewish leader make such a specific and powerful call for justice is something many of us never expected to see. As I see it, her piece is a call to live up to very high standards of action on behalf of justice.
On June 27, Nathan Diament, Director of Public Affairs for the Orthodox Union, chastised Ms. Schusterman for advising Jewish organizations to protect LGBT people at the expense of Orthodox Jews, and privileging non-discrimination policies over religious liberty. Diament noted that requiring religious employers not to discriminate against LGBT people is inconsistent with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) now under consideration. That legislation, he notes, has an exemption for religious employers that has been endorsed by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the Anti-Defamation League, and even the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights organization. This is the model that is acceptable to religious Jews, he wrote, while Schusterman’s proposal tramples on their religious liberty. When the religious and civil rights groups worked to craft a religious exemption to ENDA, they were protecting religious liberty by ensuring that the government could not override religious bodies’ judgments regarding whom to hire. Although I do hope religious institutions on their own come to see LGBT “difference” as natural to the way the Creator has made the world, that is not the case in my community nor in some Christian and Muslim communities. Consequently, I too stand by the right of synagogues, churches, and mosques and their educational institutions to make their own assessments of the religious and moral questions raised by homosexuality. It is their business.
However, Diament's motives are not truly grounded in the constitution's respect for religious diversity. He is obviously frying bigger fish. His plea is to funders. He does not want the many liberal Jews who contribute generously to Orthodox institutions to begin to make their giving conditional upon Schusterman's inclusive values. He wants them to forget that these institutions are perpetuating an ongoing erasure, if not humiliation and self-rejection that is destructive in many ways to LGBT people. Orthodox institutions have received money from non-Orthodox Jews for many decades without strings, and perhaps the time has come for funders to demand more from them.
On principle, funders like Lynn Schusterman, will wish to curtail their funding completely of non-inclusive institutions. Funders of community day schools, camps and cross denominational institutions of all kinds ought to come aboard her call for fairness and inclusion. However, there is a reasonable middle ground that can be shaped for purely Orthodox institutions on grounds similar to the ENDA exception.
Since funders of Orthodox organizations obviously want them to remain Orthodox, there is a reasonable demand that might be made of them, short of, but still in the spirit of Schusterman's call for funders to fund in light of their values.
Orthodox institutions ought to be free to refuse employment to a gentile or a non-Orthodox Jew when it comes to the sensitive roles or education or ministry. It is arguable that were the law to require an Orthodox school to hire an openly gay Bible teacher, it would be a violation of the religious liberty. But what about management roles, custodial roles or secretarial roles? Why should a school be willing to hire a sabbath-violating math teacher or a non-Jewish social studies teacher but refuse to hire a qualified gay English teacher? If a school wishes to be a total environment, it might claim that all roles need to be fulfilled by vetted halakhically observant Jews. However, once an organization has deemed some roles as “not sensitive” and so open to the most qualified person, then hiring practices ought to be non discriminatory regarding sexual orientation and gender identity as well.
Funders have the right, and perhaps even the obligation to demand more from those they support than does the government. While permitting some Orthodox Jews to remain committed to their portrayal of the tradition, even as we might disagree, we can still hold them at least partially accountable to the growing call for fairness and equity that is, G-d willing, finally about to become law.
Rabbi Steven Greenberg is a Senior Teaching Fellow at The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and author of the groundbreaking book Wrestling with God & Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition which won the Koret Book Award for Philosophy and Thought.