Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky was the only Orthodox rabbi in California, to the best of my knowledge, who went public with his opposition to Prop 8.<\/p>\n
I don’t agree with the rabbi on this but he argues his case well in the following blog post<\/a>:<\/p>\n Orthodox Judaism can never endorse or support gay marriage. Not only because there is a verse in the Torah which prohibits homosexual sex, but also because halacha has no category of marriage that involves the union of two people who are severely prohibited from engaging in a sexual relationship with one another. This is how central sexuality is to Halacha\u2019s concept of the marital relationship.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, I was not a Prop 8 supporter back in November, and am relieved that it is headed toward being overturned. Jews as a group, and Orthodox Jews in particular continue to benefit from our country\u2019s commitment to never allow any one group to impose its religious conceptions or laws upon anyone else. But Prop 8 recklessly ignores this commitment. The underlying flaw in the entire approach taken by Prop 8 proponents is their unwillingness to recognize that the term \u201cmarriage\u201d is presently a civil legal term, and therefore must be protected from any religious group\u2019s effort to superimpose a religious connotation upon it.<\/p>\n The simple and correct way to resolve the heated and explosive debate around gay marriage is to remove \u201cmarriage\u201d from the purview of government altogether. Heterosexual and homosexual couples can be granted the identical set of legal rights and privileges, consistent with our commitments to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And \u201cmarriage\u201d would be left to the realm of religion, where it was born, where it truly belongs, and where each individual religious faith can make decisions for itself as to what it deems permissible or prohibited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky was the only Orthodox rabbi in California, to the best of my knowledge, who went public with his opposition to Prop 8. I don’t agree with the rabbi on this but he argues his case well in … Continue reading