Woty Freeman Archives: June 2003

Monday, June 30, 2003 As Israel is about the Jewish people rather than religious purity, it's a very good thing that Israeli Interior Minister Avraham Poraz favorsnfs ase converter granting citizenship to people who convert to Judaism with the Reform and Conservative movements: Interior Minister Avraham Poraz called on Monday for Reform and Conservative, as well as Orthodox, conversions to be recognized for citizenship purposes for applicants living in Israel. Currently Israel recognizes any conversions performed abroad, but only Orthodox conversions are recognized of those performed inside the country. Poraz told the Knesset Immigration Committee he has found no evidence of any "legal ruling that gives the Chief Rabbinate a monopoly here on conversion." He said there is nothing preventing the High Court of Justice from ruling in favor of a petition filed by the Movement for Progressive Judaism (the Israeli arm of the Reform movement) on behalf of 13 local converts. Poraz said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has decided to uphold the practice of granting citizenship to Orthodox converts, but has not ruled out Conservative and Reform conversions. He said restrictions against Reform and Conservative rabbis, who represent 85 percent of American Jewry will lead to Israel's isolation from those communities. "What the Orthodox are doing here, monopolizing our Jewish life, is ultimately endangering the future of Israel," Lapid said. MK Michael Melchior (Labor-Meimad) expressed support for Poraz's position on recognizing Reform and Conservative conversions for citizenship. "It is only a citizenship issue and not a Halachic issue," he said. Sharon also said something good on this topic, in an interview that appeared in International Jpost 2220 (May 23, 2003/21 Iyar 5763): Regarding immigration, since I see aliya as a central objective, perhaps the most important one today, we must in my mind make it easier in this area. I am not speaking as a rabbi certainly not. But I think we must make it easier to speed up the process, not draw out the bureaucratic chains that are meant to make it [immigration] more difficult. I say that [a Jew is] whoever comes, sees himself as part of the Jewish people, serves in the army, and fights. Posted by Woty @ 05:45 PM EST [Link] Sunday, June 29, 2003 Here is an excellent refutation of the idiotarian myth that pro-Israeli Americans are all simply refusing to see Palestinians as full people because Palestinians have darker skin than they do. Posted by Woty @ 12:32 AM EST [Link] Friday, June 27, 2003 The Christian Science Monitor reports on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's reasons for supporting the Supreme Court decision overturning sodomy laws here: Although she joined in the judgment of the court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor did not share in the majority's endorsement of a bedroom privacy right. Instead, she said that in her view the Texas law was unconstitutional because it violated equal-protection principles of the 14th Amendment by requiring gay Texans to face criminal penalties for conduct that was not illegal for heterosexual couples. "A law branding one class of persons as criminal solely based on the state's moral disapproval of that class and the conduct associated with that class run contrary to the values of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause," she writes in her concurring opinion. The Supreme Court made the correct decision in this issue, but this is not a good reason to support it. Freedom should not be supported at the expense of morality; the two go together. O'Connor is correct that anti-gay sodomy laws make certain acts criminal because of the state's moral disapproval of a class of people and the conduct associated with that class. However, this could be validly said of any criminal laws. Walking around carrying signs shouldn't be illegal, in general. Walking around with signs that say libelous things about a private individual should be. Such laws discriminate against a specific class of people – namely those who choose to libel others – solely because the US legal tradition holds that libel is immoral and unlawful. Sodomy laws, like all other laws, take the position that a class of conduct is sufficiently immoral and dangerous that people should be forced not to engage in it. This is as it should be; it is not the reason sodomy laws are immoral. Rather, they are immoral because they embody a false theory about the danger of sodomy. Laws against consensual sexual behavior only make sense if there exist classes of consensual sex that are dangerous to society. People who advocate sodomy laws believe that gay sex is sufficiently dangerous to society that it must be stopped by force. But sodomy, even if immoral, isn't dangerous in that way. At worst, it's a moral error that harms a couple of consenting people and upsets some people who find out about it. Our society is strong enough to withstand mistakes of that nature. Posted by Woty @ 05:04 AM EST [Link] Wednesday, June 25, 2003 Scrappleface has a great entry mocking the claim that Bush lied to drag us into war. Posted by Woty @ 09:36 AM EST [Link] The week's Onion has an article entitled Genocide Is Such a Harsh Word that has an evil person speaking from the perspective of an idiotarian: