Neil Steinberg, Jewish and straight, has some advice for straight fundy Christians who are feeling oppressed by legal same-sex marriage...
How can McDonald’s sell cheeseburgers, even though they’re banned in the Bible, which is fairly clear about not mixing milk and meat? ... Answer: Because the laws of kosher don’t matter to anyone but observant Jews. There is no health reason why you shouldn’t mix milk and meat. Jewish dietary law has no bearing on secular law. Jews, a scant minority, are uninterested in trying to force their arcane practices upon non-believers (except in parts of Israel where, alas, emboldened by numbers, observant Jews seem determined to show they can be just as bullying as any other faith).
Anti-gay Christians are now approaching their cheeseburger moment—welcome, welcome—after the Supreme Court has tossed out much of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. The legal whip drops from the fundamentalist hand, which strikes them as oppression, forgetting they can still practice whatever private dogma they like regarding gays—never marry their own gender, disown their own gay children—but gay marriage is going up on the menu in more and more states. Society is marching—running, really—off without them, into a future of gay folk living openly without fear.
It hurts, bubbie, I know. Here’s a Kleenex.
You’ll get used to it. Take it from a Jew. You get used to the world not singing along with your religious peccadillos. (Not that keeping kosher and discriminating against gays are comparable, except as religiously inspired irrational acts). No harm in cleaving to your faith in the midst of a carnival of all you don’t believe. At Christmas, it isn’t like I suffer through all these foreign practices—caroling, wassailing, midnight massing. I accept them with humility—it’s not my party, but it’s someone’s party. It isn’t all about me.
That takes practice, but you’ll get used to it.
