Two of the interesting developments in recent years has been the rise of the religious right and a generally more muted reaction from other religious groups and organizations about it then you’d expect.
No more. A prominent Jewish leader has blasted the religious right in a very public way. The AP:
HOUSTON – The leader of the largest branch of American Judaism blasted conservative religious activists in a speech Saturday, calling them “zealots” who claim a “monopoly on God” while promoting anti-gay policies akin to Adolf Hitler’s.
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, said “religious right” leaders believe “unless you attend my church, accept my God and study my sacred text you cannot be a moral person.”
“What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God?” he said during the movement’s national assembly in Houston, which runs through Sunday.
The audience of 5,000 responded to the speech with enthusiastic applause.
Yoffie did not mention evangelical Christians directly, using the term “religious right” instead. In a separate interview, he said the phrase encompassed conservative activists of all faiths, including within the Jewish community.
He has a point there: the “religious right” does also exist, it could be argued, within Judaism. But the key meaning — and impact — of what he was saying is lost no one. Especially because he had even more to say:
He used particularly strong language to condemn conservative attitudes toward homosexuals. He said he understood that traditionalists have concluded gay marriage violates Scripture, but he said that did not justify denying legal protections to same-sex partners and their children.
“We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations,” Yoffie said. “Yes, we can disagree about gay marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the hellfires of anti-gay bigotry.”
There are a few explanations for his comments. Firstly, he has said out loud what many American Jews have said for some time privately but didn’t express due to fears that it could stir up anti-semitism.
Another reason, could be that the climate now seems different than it was just a year ago. With the Bush administration under fire from many quarters, President George Bush’s polling numbers down, the failure of social conservatives on the Terri Schiavo case, the “religious right” still is powerful but its clout and political judgment doesn’t look as keen as it did before. It seemed an unstoppable force; now it seems like a force that has overreached and the most powerful person most sympathetic to it in power has lost some of his clout.
But all that is speculative, even if it does make sense. The bottom line is that Reform Judaism is a highly inclusive branch of Judaism. There are even some good natured jokes about it (Go to an Orthodox wedding, the bride’s mother is pregnant. Go to a Conservative wedding, the bride is pregnant. Go to a Reform wedding, the rabbi is pregnant.). It isn’t surprising that one of the strongest political statements about whether or not the religious right is tolerant or means trouble for other groups would come from a Reform leader.
A RELATED ARTICLE (posted by Holly in Cincinnati):
Haaretz: ADL’s Foxman warns of efforts to ‘Christianize America’
By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent
NEW YORK – Institutionalized Christianity in the U.S. has grown so extremist that it poses a tangible danger to the principle of separation of church and state and threatens to undermine the religious tolerance that characterizes the country, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, warned in his address to the League’s national commission, meeting in New York City over the weekend.
“Today we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!” he said.
Foxman proceeded to describe the process and to name names…
UPDATE: The reform group has voted to oppose Samuel Alito Jr’s nomination to the Supreme Court:
HOUSTON — The largest branch of North American Judaism voted on Sunday to oppose Samuel Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
More than 2,000 delegates of the Union for Reform Judaism adopted a resolution saying Alito would “shift the ideological balance of the Supreme Court on matters of core concern to the reform movement” on abortion rights, women’s rights, civil rights and the scope of federal power.
The vote came at the closing session of the group’s biennial convention, which was held in Houston Wednesday through Sunday.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.