Homosexuality, discrimination and morality in American culture

'Roundtable Ethics' features University faculty members answering ethical and moral questions solicited from the community. The questions may range from personal to academic in nature. The 'Prince' hopes that the column will spark campus dialogue.

This week's columnist, Rabbi James S. Diamond is Director of the Center for Jewish Life.

Is discrimination against homosexuals in any way justified? Does the Constitution fully protect the rights of homosexuals?

In a society like ours that rests on the principles of tolerance and pluralism bequeathed to us by the legacy of the Enlightenment, discrimination against a person on the basis of his or her sexual identity or preference is reprehensible. It is unthinkable — even outrageous — to claim that the rights of homosexual individuals are not already guaranteed by the Constitution and are in need of more explicit protection.

The real issue is why such questions would even be raised in the first place. What would predispose us to think that homosexuals might have less rights than their heterosexual fellow humans? The answer, I am afraid, lies in what our religious traditions have taught on these matters. This is where the problem begins. The verses in Leviticus that hold homosexuality to be an "abhorrence," (18:22) and a capital offense (20:13) weigh heavily and mortifyingly here.

We cannot undo these teachings. We can, however, decide how we want to handle them. That will be a function of how we read and process our respective received religious traditions. We can ignore them; we can swallow them whole; or we can vitiate their incongruence with our post-Enlightenment social values by interpreting them in the historical and cultural context in which they originated.

But even those who take their religious traditions straight ought not to read homosexuals out of the American social contract. They can embrace all people, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, as holy beings created in the Divine image without necessarily endorsing the manner in which their sexual identity is expressed. (In this regard heterosexuals have no monopoly on virtue or morality or responsibility in their sexual behavior.)

My own perspective is to see this entire matter within the ongoing and still unfolding process of understanding who we are as human beings, a process I believe is intrinsically a never-ending one. We have made some progress in our comprehension of race and gender. Now we are beginning to broaden and deepen the way we may comprehend human sexuality and sexual identity. We still may not know as much as we need to know in these areas but we know a lot more than we did in ages past. And the more we know, the more we are coming to appreciate that as in virtually all other aspects of human existence, diversity is the order of the day. Just as most of us are right-handed and some of us are left-handed, just as some of us have blond hair and some of us brown or black or red, so most of us are heterosexual and some of us are homosexual and, in some cases, bisexual. God clearly relishes diversity.

In any case, the society in which we (thankfully) live rests on secular and not religious principles and values. Our citizenship in and commitment to this secular polity overrides the specific teachings that issue from sectarian religious traditions. On this basis the rights of homosexuals are no less secure than those of heterosexuals. The real question for religionists and other upholders of a morality based on transcendent values who are vexed by homosexuality is: Where does manifest piety end and latent homophobia begin? This is where the proverbial shoe should pinch. One teaching found in Rabbinic Judaism seems particularly relevant here: "Do not judge your fellow person until you have been in his [or her] place."

Does the United States sink to the same moral ground as the likes of Osama bin Laden when we use "good vs. evil" metaphors for other countries (i.e. what's the objective difference between bin Laden calling Bush "the great infidel" and Bush calling bin Laden "the evil one").

The assumption that as a nation the United States stands on higher moral ground than other countries may be nothing more than an ethnocentric conceit, an illusory self-understanding that every country probably holds about itself as a national enterprise. I say this because in one respect all nation-states stand on the same moral ground. They all have a citizenry to protect, turf to defend, and economic interests to advance. They all have histories, collective memories, national narratives, and founding myths that energize and underwrite their foreign and domestic policies and the means they employ to implement them. If necessary they will all resort to the most destructive and lethal means available to them to protect and fulfill their national aspirations. I speak of all countries. The United States is no exception.

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So my first conclusion, and it's bad news, is that the world of nation-states is a treacherous place, a human jungle. And in it — I say this with profound sadness — the rules of the game are that might makes right. Actually this is not news. Machiavelli and Hobbes have mapped the terrain.

Viewed this way there is no difference objectively speaking between bin Laden calling Bush "the great infidel" and Bush calling bin Laden "the evil one." Within the contexts of their respective national narratives each one is correct. (Technically the comparison is incorrect: Bin Laden (and al Qaeda) are not a country and the United States. is.)

But this is not the whole story, for in another respect all nations do not occupy the same moral ground. This is because not all national narratives possess identical moral valence. No sane person, for example, would maintain that the national myths of the United States and Nazi Germany are of equal moral validity.

The raison d'etre of this country derives from some sublime political thought that distills some powerful ideas from the human experience and from western culture. We should always be ready to defend it when it is under attack, as it was in World War II and as it is now.

But let's do so with less hubris and more humility. We need to be more mindful of the fact that America is and will always be a bold social experiment, an attempt, unprecedented in human political history, to arrange a society from scratch, according to the principles of the Enlightenment. We are not yet entitled to conclude that the experiment is an unqualified success and, more importantly, that it must be tried out or imposed on other nations. Why not operate in the world as if America is the best country for Americans, defend it on that basis, and not let our superpower status seduce us into arrogating to ourselves the right to force other states to be just like us?

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