[Avodah] Clear Thinking About Male Homosexuals

[T613K at aol.com]

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:02:31  -0600
From: "Jay F Shachter" <_jay at m5.chicago.il.us_ 
(mailto:jay at m5.chicago.il.us) >


[1] Some knowledge is built into the human condition.  It  is
a consequence of being human that you know -- you just know --  that
murder is wrong.  ....Judaism teaches that the
prohibition  of pederasty falls within the Seven Noahide Commandments.
In other words, it  is an act forbidden not only to Jews, but also to
all human beings, which  means that there is something intrinsic to our
nature that knows that it is  forbidden. ....
 
 
 
[2] .... There are acts which a Jew must die rather  than
perform, which are nevertheless perfectly permitted to a descendant  of
Noah.  My favorite example (because of its shock value) is  sexual
intercourse with your daughter. .....We do not possess any innate  knowledge
that sexual intercourse with our daughters is  forbidden.  ....
 
[3] ..... The fact is that I don't even know
for sure that my  heterosexual impulses are genetically determined, but
I assume that they are,  because of the evolutionary advantage that
they confer ....So let us
now  assume the existence of people with genes inside of them which
make them grow  up into homosexuals.  The Torah essentially says that
these people may  not have sexual pleasure, ever, their entire lives....

[4]  ... Nearly every
married person reading this article is, I am certain,  forbidden to
have sexual intercourse at this moment (else why are you sitting  in
front of your computer monitor reading  this?),....  
 
[5] .... Jewish men are
not even allowed to masturbate.  Just keep this in mind, the next time
you are trying to summon sympathy  for a male Jewish homosexual, even
one, perhaps, who is not entirely sinless.  It's like being told by
the Torah that you may not have sexual  intercourse, nor even
masturbate, ever, for the rest of your  life.


Jay F.  ("Yaakov")  Shachter



>>>>>
 
[1] It is not necessarily the case that all the seven mitzvos are things  
people instinctively know.  Eiver min hachai?  Even murder -- people  may 
instinctively know that it's wrong in general, but they find it easy to  
rationalize exceptions in which it's fine:  if a person is suffering, or  old, or 
handicapped, or useless; if the person is a Jew and therefore not  "really" 
a person; if the person is an infidel.  Etc.  But in the case  of sexual 
sins I think that you are right and that people do instinctively feel  a 
revulsion towards certain acts, a revulsion that has to be "educated" out of  them 
before they will commit these acts.  Every society has some kind of  incest 
taboo, for example.  And probably homosexual acts are in this  category of 
something that people in every society instinctively feel is wrong  -- if 
not morally wrong, then at any rate unnatural.  When Avodah Zarah was  rampant 
it actively worked to overcome people's natural revulsion at certain  
things -- public defecation for example, a specialty of the Ba'al Pe'or.   Greek 
society actively worked to overcome people's natural revulsion at  
homosexuality, for reasons that are as obscure to me as the attraction of the  Ba'al 
Pe'or.
 
[2]  It is not true that people feel no instinctive revulsion at  
father-daughter incest.  On the contrary, what Lot did with his daughters  is 
considered something shameful and disgusting, and the daughter who named her  child 
"Moav -- from Father" -- is condemned as particularly brazen.  I  believe 
that the reason this isn't included in the 7 mitzvos has to do with the  
technical difficulty of determining for sure who is one's father  or who is 
one's daughter.  People would never be able to marry at  all, or not without 
taking extraordinary precautions, for fear that they might  inadvertently be 
marrying their own daughter or father.  Jews, who live at  a high level of 
morality, have a public marriage with eidim and kidushin, and  also live lives 
that are constricted in certain ways (e.g., hilchos yichud),  such that 
there is a chezkas kashrus in the case of Jews, an assumption that a  girl can 
rely on the fact that her social father really is her father, and  a man can 
assume that he knows all his children, and knows that he hasn't  dropped 
seed randomly somewhere outside of his marriage that might have  grown up to be 
his unknown daughter.
 
[3]  "Evolutionary advantage"?  Perhaps you should rather have  said, 
"survival advantage."  Evolution is an unproven hypothesis and even  if it did 
occur, it was Divinely guided.  We have to say that the natural  attraction 
between men and women is something that was implanted in us by our  Creator so 
that the human race would continue.  (He also created people who  are not 
destined to marry or have children, for various reasons known to  Him.  File 
under, "why is there suffering in the world?")  But if you  /are/ going to 
talk about evolutionary advantage, you do have to answer  this question:  
what possible evolutionary or survival advantage could  there be in certain 
people being genetically homosexual?  One would  think that such a trait would 
long since have died out.  
 
[4] You are making the very assumption (the false assumption) that  
underlies so much of the evil in the Sexual Revolution including the Gay  Movement. 
 That is the assumption that people would rather engage in sexual  activity 
than in any other activity, indeed, that an asexual life is almost  
unbearable.  Possibly you are still a young man.  It is a proven fact  that some 
people enjoy the internet so much that they will continue to sit at  their 
computers even when other enjoyable activities are available.  It is  simply 
untrue that a celibate life is necessarily a life devoid of  pleasure.
 
[5]  Just because something is forbidden doesn't mean that a person  won't 
sometimes succumb to his yetzer hara, especially if by doing so, he avoids  
committing an even greater sin.  Some sins are worse than other sins  
vehameivin yavin. 
 
 
 
 



--Toby Katz
=============
Romney -- good  values, good family, good  hair


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