SJ 7 and the Jews

Why Jews Should Oppose SJ 7

Opening Remarks at Jewish Community Relations Council Workshop on

Same-Sex Marriage
For the JCRC, there are really two questions about SJ 7. One is a policy question, and one is a question my grandmother would have asked. The policy question is: would this be good or bad for Indiana? The grandmother question is: would it be good or bad for the Jews?
There are a lot of bad public policies. Since the JCRC has limited resources, those resources need to be focused on issues that clearly threaten our community and our religious values. I think SJ 7 is such an issue, and is something the JCRC should actively oppose, because it isn’t just bad policy; it is also bad for the Jews.
I won’t spend a lot of time on the reasons it is bad policy, because those will undoubtedly be addressed by others. Let me just quickly enumerate some of them:

  • It’s bad for economic development. Indiana is trying to recruit and grow high tech industries that employ a significant number of gay people. Sending a message that Indiana doesn’t value gay citizens won’t help.
  • It’s bad for business. The language of Part B virtually ensures that there will be a lot of costly litigation over its application.
  • It’s bad for civil liberties. SJ 7 would write discrimination into the constitution—a precedent I don’t think we want to set.
  • It’s bad for families. This ban would do absolutely nothing to “protect” families, and claiming that it would is illogical. Look at the four most common justifications:
1) Gays are immoral. If legislators care so much about morality, why do they let rapists and murderers marry?

2) Marriage is for procreation. Then why do we let old people and sterile people get married?

3) Gay parenting is harmful to children. There isn’t a scrap of credible research supporting that assertion. Most of the “studies” cited as “evidence” come from the same good scholars who first alerted us to the fact that Sponge-Bob Squarepants is gay.

4) Same-sex unions will undermine the institution of marriage. We aren’t told how or why. For that matter, the same thing was said about interracial marriages, and about letting women own property and vote.
These aren’t reasons—they are excuses. So SJ 7 is bad public policy. But SJ 7 is also bad for the Jews. Not just because Jews do better in open and tolerant societies, although we do, but because the Jewish community has an enormously important stake in preserving the constitutional separation of church and state. SJ 7 is an effort to turn a religious belief held by some Christians into the law, in a state where many citizens—including many Christians—do not share that belief.
Now, all laws are based to some extent on a society’s shared moral premises—shared being the operative term. But in our constitutional system, in order to be legitimate, laws must be justified by what philosophers call “public reasons”—secular civic purposes that are not grounded solely in religious doctrine. Let me suggest an example: In Judaism, we circumcise baby boys eight days after birth. There is research suggesting that wives of men who have been circumcised may be less likely to get cervical cancer. (That research is actually a lot more credible than the research cited by proponents of SJ 7.) If we had enough votes, should we pass a law requiring that all male infants be circumcised, irrespective of the wishes or beliefs of the child’s parents? If we leave out the eight-day wait and don’t require that a mohel perform the circumcision, would such a law be a secular exercise of authority?
Or take a less fanciful example: women’s rights were fiercely resisted for decades, in substantial part because a majority of Americans believed God wanted women to stay home and be submissive to their husbands. That isn’t what policymakers said, of course—they talked about protecting the “traditional family.”
This is not just about marriage. The people who support this ban believe homosexuality is evil, and that equal rights for gays are an endorsement of evil. They are the same people who oppose application of Indiana’s civil rights laws to gays and lesbians, the same people who defeated a city ordinance extending health care coverage to domestic partners of gay city workers. The organizations opposed to same-sex unions are the same ones that sent angry letters to the editor when Mitch Daniels and Carl Brizzi adopted employment policies protecting workers from being fired for being gay.
This measure is part of a much wider campaign to marginalize an entire group of people because some Christian denominations disapprove of them, and part of an ongoing assault on separation of Church and State. If there is one thing Jews have learned over the centuries, it is that we do not do well in a society that gives government the right to decide whose beliefs and “lifestyles” are acceptable.
Here’s the deal: the First Amendment means that Jews have to honor the free speech rights of Nazis and anti-Semites. We have to protect the right of religious figures to say things like “God doesn’t hear the prayer of the Jew,” or “God hates fags.” And people whose religions disapprove of homosexuality have to swallow hard and honor the right of all Americans to equality before the law. They don’t have to approve, they don’t have to invite gay people (or Jews) to dinner. They can picket gay pride, they can denounce gay culture, they can run homophobic political candidates. But in a society that separates church from state, they cannot deprive an entire group of people of equal treatment before the law. That is the line in the sand—and once it is erased, no one is safe.
Since we’re talking about religion, let me just conclude by referencing a passage from Leviticus that I don’t hear quoted by proponents of SJ 7. It describes an old ritual in which the high priest placed his hands on the head of a goat, and confessed the sins of the people. The goat was then sent into the wilderness, taking the sins of the people with it.
When people are frightened, when their world no longer seems comprehensible, they need someone to blame and send into the wilderness—a scapegoat. The Germans wanted a reason for their lost war and ruined economy, and blamed the Jews. In Salem, when things went wrong, it was the witches. Today, for those who find themselves surrounded by social change and events they can’t understand or control, it’s “the homosexuals” and “the gay agenda.” It is understandable, but it is an enormously dangerous road to travel.
And—as my grandmother would have said—it’s a road that is very bad for the Jews.

Thank you.
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Different Strokes, Same Folks

American public policy is schizophrenic.

 

I attribute this to our unique history: despite our tendency to think of America as a creation of the Founding Fathers, their generation was preceded by the Puritans and other religious dissenters who first colonized our shores. Constitutional historian Frank Lambert calls those initial settlers the “Planting Fathers,” and reminds us that in the 150 or so years that elapsed between Planters and Founders, the Enlightenment occurred, and dramatically altered prevailing beliefs about government and liberty.

 

The Puritans defined liberty as “freedom to do the right thing.” (And they, of course, decided what “the right thing” was.) The Founders—influenced profoundly by thinkers like John Locke—defined liberty as freedom to pursue your own life purposes free of state interference, so long as you did not thereby harm the person or property of others. While it was the Founders’ version that informed our constitution and legal system, our Puritan heritage remains alive and well. These two very different notions of what government ought to do have been duking it out in the body politic and even within our individual psyches ever since.

 

The Puritan approach—sometimes described as an overwhelming fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time—gives us laws aimed at making us godly and upright. The Founders’ approach can be seen in the equally wide-spread American attitude of “live and let live.” We still don’t seem to have noticed that the two approaches are largely incompatible.

 

The result of these warring impulses is a large measure of incoherence in our public policies. To be blunt, we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. On the one hand, most Americans have agreed with the Founders that government—especially at the federal level—should be limited in size and scope. But in order to deal with all those people who stubbornly refuse to do the right thing, we keep giving government new powers and building new bureaucracies. Historians note that, despite the conventional wisdom, big government didn’t begin with FDR and the New Deal; it began with the federal infrastructure we created to enforce Prohibition.

 

The disconnect is visible everywhere. Americans want freedom of speech—but not freedom to say that!  We want freedom of religion—but maybe not for the Wiccans, or the Nation of Islam. We take pride in America’s scientific leadership, but stem cell research isn’t the “right thing,” so we send that research to competitors overseas.

 

Here in Indiana, some legislators are making noises about requiring schools to teach “Intelligent Design.” These are the same people who tell us that they support home rule and local control of public schools. They are the same people who have enthusiastically endorsed Administration efforts to recruit employers and jobs in the high paying fields of biotechnology and information technology—precisely the employers least likely to locate in a state seen as hostile to science.

 

One of these days, policymakers are going to have to choose between Enlightenment logic and their inner Puritans.    

 

 

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Sing Kumbaya

American employers have come to understand that customers come in all religions, genders, races and sexual orientations, and so growing numbers of them have adopted employment policies intended to say "welcome" in whatever language or tradition will open those customers’ pocketbooks. And globalization of business has meant more interaction and familiarity with people who are different from, say, the folks back in Kansas. All this–I once naively believed–would eventually issue in a sort of "Star Trek" era of goodwill, where people of all sorts (eventually, perhaps, even species of all sorts) would live and work together in harmony. Kumbaya and all that.
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Morality or Bigotry?

How did the song go? You say “potato” and I say “po-tah-to?”

 

Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi triggered a modern version of the old standard when he adopted a new office policy providing that employment decisions would be made only on the basis of job performance, and that no one would be discriminated against on the basis of skin color, gender or sexual orientation. From my perspective, this was an entirely appropriate confirmation of the value Americans place on equal treatment before the law. According to Micah Clark and the American Family Association, it was a cowardly acquiescence to the “homosexual agenda” and a “slap in the face” to citizens of Marion County.

 

Whatever views people hold on the far more volatile issue of same-sex marriage, if polls are to be believed, most Americans are deeply committed to fairness in the workplace and equal treatment before the law. Because it is so difficult to argue that employers ought to be able to fire people just for being gay (or black, Jewish or Christian), those objecting to equal civil rights for gays have asserted that they aren’t really against equal rights—they are against “special rights.”  But it has become quite clear that what they define as “special” is equal rights for gay people.

 

A couple of weeks ago, the Kansas Supreme Court struck down the sort of law that the American Family Association feels is proper. Kansas had adopted a statute prescribing penalties for statutory rape—consensual sex between two individuals, one of whom is under the age of consent. For heterosexuals, the maximum penalty under the statute is fifteen months. Matthew Limon, a gay teenager convicted of having sex with a younger gay teenager, had already served five years of a seventeen-year sentence.

 

Let me be very clear: if every single other fact of the offense had been identical, but Matthew had been arrested for heterosexual conduct, he would have served at most fifteen months. He got an extra fifteen years and nine months because he was gay. When the Kansas court ruled that this amounted to unconstitutional discrimination, the decision was met with predictable accusations of “judicial activism.” In language quite similar to Micah Clark’s, a Kansas pastor decried the ruling as “a victory for supporters of a creeping gay-rights agenda.”   

 

To his credit, the Kansas Attorney-General, a Republican, has said the state is unlikely to appeal, and pointedly noted that when he had served in the legislature, he had voted against the law.

 

The bottom line in these debates—and in the ongoing City-County Council struggle to include gay people under the City’s Human Relations Ordinance—is quite clear. On one side are those who may or may not approve of homosexuality on religious grounds, but who nevertheless believe that every American should be treated equally in the workplace and by the law. On the other side are those who believe that laws preventing them from punishing or harassing gay people are somehow an “endorsement” of homosexuality.

 

Potato—po-tah-to.

  

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Revolutionary Fervor

Maybe it’s because we are a country born out of a revolution, but Americans have a decided preference for dramatic change, and little interest in the boring details of our governmental processes.

 

I thought about that aspect of our national character earlier this month, as I listened to a variety of presentations at the annual Howey Political Forum. The focus was on economic and administrative challenges facing Indiana and proposals for meeting those challenges.

 

In a forceful speech, Governor Daniels emphasized his commitment to thoroughgoing change, and he ticked off a number of those he intends to pursue: continuing to close underused BMV license branches, privatizing prisons, consolidating school corporations, turning some state highways into toll roads, and several others. He added that “no one should be surprised” by his determination to enact sweeping changes in Indiana’s government, because he had run a campaign in which he’d promised to do just that.

 

Governor Daniels was absolutely right; he did campaign on a promise of sweeping change. And I suspect that the mantra of change was a very important element in his victory. “It’s time for a change” is a powerful and time-honored theme of American political life. Rather than analyzing what the proposed change will accomplish, and how it will be implemented, Americans have an unquenchable optimism that the new idea will be better than the one it replaced, and the bigger, the better.

 

This is not to speak to the merits of any of the Governor’s proposals. I agree with some, and disagree with others. But it was hard not to hear in his enthusiastic speech some disquieting echoes of former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who was often quoted as saying about city government, “If it isn’t broken, break it. Then fix it.” I guess I just want to be sure that what we are undertaking to fix is really already broken.

 

I also think it is interesting that Republicans and Democrats alike prefer sweeping new measures to the sorts of admittedly boring, incremental improvements that everyone familiar with government thinks we need. During a later panel, Pat Kiely, a former Republican legislator widely respected on both sides of the aisle, talked about one of the enduring frustrations companies encounter when they do business with state government. Most state agencies are organized into regions. This makes sense: why should people in Northwest Indiana, for example, have to come to Indianapolis to deal with a government agency? But as Kiely noted, there is no consistency in either the number of regions or their number. The Indiana Economic Development Commission has six, Workforce Development has eleven, Tourism, six, the State Police, seventeen. There are nine Education Service Centers, four Indiana Housing and Community Development Offices, and three air quality regions. And so on.

 

Perhaps, before we embark on the really revolutionary changes—like turning our prisons and roads over to corporations—we could rationalize the haphazard mess through which we deliver state services. It wouldn’t be as sexy, but it’s already broken.

   

 

 

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