May 16, 2012 | 11:52 am

Public teacher rants about being Mary Magdalene, marrying God

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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And I thought the gold-teeth-from-God story was bizarre. In San Benito, Texas, a ninth grade teacher has been removed from the classroom after subjecting students at her public school to a 12-minute rant about her belief that Jesus had a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene and that this unidentified teacher was Mary Magdalene incarnate.

From Kate Shellnutt at the Houston Chronicle:

“I am married to God, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to my husband that’s here (on earth). One of my eyes is mine and the other one belongs to God, so God is watching what you all are doing.”

More from the Houston Press:

She said that an army of God was coming to destroy this world on December 21, 2012, but not to worry, because Jesus had created another planet that was more beautiful than this one, a Utopia full of waterfalls where everybody was always 25 years old, where money does not exist, but Christmas does, complete with Santa Claus.

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She says that she loves Jesus and that they will be getting married one day and that she will give birth to their child once she gets to heaven. She says that though she has never met Jesus, the two of them spoke daily and he kept her up all night with his conversation.

The rant, captured on a student’s cell phone and shared on YouTube, can be seen at the top of this post. It starts in English and then transitions into Spanish.

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May 16, 2012 | 10:18 am

Jesus makes another bid for president?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo by Wikipedia/Francisco Ribalta

Four years ago, there was the Jesus for President campaign, through which a progressive Christian urged other Christians to vote based on environmental and social justice issues, not abortion and homosexuality. This election season there is a very different “Vote for Jesus” effort being led by Internet evangelist Bill Keller, who five years ago lost his TV program for slamming Islam.

The Christian Post reports on Keller’s disgust for Romney and Obama:

Keller, who in the past has compared the choice between Romney and Obama as “flipping a coin where Satan is on both sides,” explained in an exclusive interview with The Christian Post on Friday that Christians can play a big part in the future of America by making a statement vote by writing in “Jesus” on their ballots, instead of choosing “the lesser of two evils.”

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“This is not about politics, it is about THE ETERNAL SOULS OF MEN! A true Christian will NEVER put politics above souls, so please watch for any so-called Christian leader who endorses and supports either President Obama or Mitt Romney, since they are nothing but ‘hirelings’ and NOT true men or women of God since they obviously don’t care about souls!” Keller expressed in a written statement on the Vote for Jesus website.

This is not the first time an evangelical has said Romney is not guided by God or that Obama is part of Satan’s plan (and Justin Bieber is too). But, beyond that, I get the feeling—a sneaking suspicion—that Keller doesn’t understand the role of the president of the United States.

Jesus is, indeed, a perennially popular write-in candidate. And this is not the first time that an individual or organization has encouraged voters to write-in Jesus rather than vote for a name on the ballot.

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May 15, 2012 | 10:23 pm

Beinart and Suissa debate ‘Is Zionism in Crisis?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

If you’re in Los Angeles Wednesday, there is a great event worth checking out at Temple Israel of Hollywood. Peter Beinart, of “The Crisis of Zionism,” will debate David Suissa, the Jewish Journal president, on Beinart’s new book. The debate will be moderated by Temple Israel’s Rabbi John Rosove, who mentions a little about the debate on his blog.

If you’re going to go, Rosove warns you to arrive early. Beinart draws a big crowd. And if you’re not in LA, or you prefer to watch from home, the debate will be streamed live here.

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May 15, 2012 | 7:25 pm

Facebook’s role in furthering Jewish life

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There is a lot of hype surrounding Friday’s IPO of Facebook, and though I’d like to complete the tech-companies-that-will-rule-the-world trinity by adding some Facebook stock to my Google and Apple holdings, I think I’m going to stay away. Facebook just seems a bit (or a lot) overvalued.

But is the Facebook IPO good for the Jews?

Strange question. Uriel Heilman of JTA answers it by saying that the Talmud, if written today, might look just like Facebook: status updates followed by commentary. More broadly, the IPO has potential to bring a lot of new money into the American Jewish community. Plus ...

Facebook enables Jews to construct communities organized around areas of interest rather than geography, religious denomination or institution.

When Hindy Poupko Galena and her husband, Seth, began using Facebook to update friends and family about their year-old daughter’s fight against a rare bone marrow disease, a community of sympathizers quickly emerged that included thousands of people who had never met the toddler, Ayelet.

Strangers reached out to the Galenas—members of the Modern Orthodox community on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—not just with messages but with care packages.

“It allowed people to connect with what was going on on a very deep and real level,” Hindy said. “So many people came out of the woodwork and emailed me and said, ‘I had a sick kid and never told anyone about it, but I now feel that I can tell people about it.’ ”

Even now, months after Ayelet’s death in January at age 2, the Facebook-based community, which they call Ayelet Nation, serves as a source of sympathy for the Galenas.

“For a girl who only lived two years, it’s very comforting to know that people know her name, and I think that was only possible because of Facebook,” Hindy said.

Read the rest here.

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May 15, 2012 | 3:44 pm

Y-Love, black Jewish rapper, comes out as gay

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yitz Jordan’s identity as a black Orthodox Jewish rapper was already a bit complicated. Jordan, known as Y-Love has struggled with his public image for years—and today in an interview published by Out magazine Y-Love revealed that he is gay.

An excerpt:

“I’ve never been conflicted about my sexuality,” Jordan told Out in an exclusive interview this week. “Any conflicts that have come up in my life have come up because of other people’s homophobia. I’ve always known when to be in the closet and when not to.”

So why come out now? According to Jordan, he’s wanted to tell the world that he’s gay for some time, but he was concerned that his “public reputation” would be tarnished and the music career he has fought so hard to carve out in a seemingly intolerant community would be ruined.

“I feel like I’ve wasted years of my life worrying that it would alienate the community I dedicated my life to as an artist and as a man. But my hope is that it will open their eyes—and hearts.”

Read the rest here.

I met Jordan, 34, at Jewlicious in 2009, when I was there to discuss my own complicated Jew-ish identity. His story has been passing around my Jewish friends on Facebook today, and I’ve seen nothing but support (like this from William Daroff).

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May 14, 2012 | 5:01 pm

2d Cir: NY kosher law doesn’t violate First Amendment

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last week, in Commack Self-Service Kosher Meats, Inc. v. Hooker, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld New York’s 2004 Kosher Law Protection Act. The court stated that a labeling law requiring manufacturers of kosher foods to file with the state Department of Agriculture before using label on sold products serves a secular purpose of protecting against consumer fraud.

(Short Reuters story here; the court’s opinion here.)

Significantly, the law did not suffer from the fatal flaws of a previous New York kosher law struck down in 2002 because it required courts to make religious decisions, which the First Amendment prohibits courts from doing. As Howard Friedman noted, this law “does not define what is kosher, adopt kosher standards of any particular branch of Judaism nor authorize state inspectors to determine if products are in fact kosher.”

Significantly, the court said:

New York, through the Kosher Act, has not explicitly adopted or endorsed one religion or religious group over another, nor has it encouraged particular religious activities.  The neutral labeling requirement does not define “kosher” or any other religious terms and contrasts with prior situations in which this Court has found a perception of endorsement. ...

Therefore, because the amended Kosher Act neither advances nor impedes religion, has a secular purpose, and does not create an excessive entanglement between state and religion, it does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The court also found a Free Exercise challenge in want because Kosher Act is a neutral, generally applicable law that imposes a nonsubstantial burden and has a rationale basis. In other words, none of the key elements for a Free Exercise violation cut against the kosher law.

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May 14, 2012 | 4:13 pm

Young adviser picked to run Obama campaign’s faith outreach

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Michael Wear, a 23-year-old executive assistant in the White House, has been picked to lead the Obama campaign’s faith outreach. RNS reports, via Christianity Today:

“It has been an honor working with Michael Wear to create positive faith-based and nonprofit partnerships to serve people in need,” said Joshua DuBois, executive director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Wear was DuBois’ executive assistant….

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Wear was an intern during Obama’s 2008 campaign, specializing in outreach to religious groups. He helped arrange candidate Obama’s appearance at a presidential forum at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California as well as a meeting between Obama and prominent Christian leaders in Chicago.

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“Michael has spent a number of years in the faith-based office so he knows the territory,” said Amy Sullivan, author of “The Party Faithful,” a book on religion and American politics. “But the Republicans would put somebody senior with years and years of experience and a big Rolodex in that position. And I guess that tells you something about how Democrats still view faith outreach and its importance.”

I’ve written much before about the suspicions I have when political candidates talk about their religious beliefs and faith-inspired values, particularly during the 2008 presidential election season. And my concerns have not changed, though I think that four years with President Obama have shown us that it’s not too prone to religious pandering (see the support for gay marriage that he announced last week or simply his approach to finding a new home church for his family).

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May 11, 2012 | 2:14 pm

Evangelicals embracing homosexuality?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Part of the reason that I disagree with Franklin Graham’s “shaken fist” comment is that I disagree with his premise about whether the government should be treating marriage as a religious institution. There is also a lot less uniformity with my generation of evangelical Christians on the “correct” Christian approach to homosexuality.

Cathleen Falsani addresses this in an excellent piece at the Huffington Post, focusing on a branch of evangelicalism that is taking a different view of homosexuality. An excerpt that begins with someone you’d expect to see in this piece, Jay Bakker:

“The simple fact is that Old Testament references in Leviticus do treat homosexuality as a sin ... a capital offense even,” Bakker writes. “But before you say, ‘I told you so,’ consider this: Eating shellfish, cutting your sideburns and getting tattoos were equally prohibited by ancient religious law.

“The truth is that the Bible endorses all sorts of attitudes and behaviors that we find unacceptable (and illegal) today and decries others that we recognize as no big deal.”
Leviticus prohibits interracial marriage, endorses slavery and forbids women to wear trousers. Deuteronomy calls for brides who are found not to be virgins to be stoned to death, and for adulterers to be summarily executed.

“The church has always been late,” Bakker told me in an interview this week. “We were late on slavery. We were late on civil rights. And now we’re late on this.”

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Tony Jones, a “theologian-in-residence” at Minnesota’s Solomon’s Porch, one of the pre-eminent “Emergent’’ churches in the nation, echoes many of Bakker’s arguments. Peggy Campolo, wife of evangelist Tony Campolo, has been saying this kind of thing for years, despite her husband’s disagreement.

And while he stops short of explicitly saying “it’s not a sin’’ in his 2010 book, A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren, godfather of the Emergent church movement, condemns a Christian preoccupation with homosexual issues as “fundasexuality.’

Read the rest here.

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May 11, 2012 | 11:30 am

NYT on sexual abuse and intimidation in Brooklyn’s Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There is nothing new about news of sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. I mentioned a few stories about this in 2009, and last year noted that at the Halacha Conference for Professionals, a rabbi said that before reporting abuse, you must first consult with a rabbi to see if your suspicion is “reasonable.”

The New York Times has followed this story with an incredibly powerful piece. You’ve probably already read it, but I’d be remiss to not share this excerpt:

In Brooklyn, of the 51 molesting cases involving the ultra-Orthodox community that the district attorney’s office says it has closed since 2009, nine were dismissed because the victims backed out. Others ended with plea deals because the victims’ families were fearful.

“People aren’t recanting, but they don’t want to go forward,” said Rhonnie Jaus, a sex crimes prosecutor in Brooklyn. “We’ve heard some of our victims have been thrown out of schools, that the person is shunned from the synagogue. There’s a lot of pressure.”

One example was the case against Joseph Gelbman, after whose arrest a rabbi called the mother of the allegedly abused boy, “asking her to cease her cooperation with the criminal case and, instead, to bring the matter to a rabbinical court under his jurisdiction”.

“I said: ‘Why? He might do this again to other children,’ ” the mother said in the statement. The mother, who asked that The New York Times not use her name to avoid identifying her son, told the police that the rabbi asked, “What will you gain from this if he goes to jail?” and said that, in a later call, he offered her $20,000 to pay for therapy for her son if the charges were dropped.

On April 24, three days before the case was set for trial, the boy was expelled from his school. When the mother protested, she said, the principal threatened to report her for child abuse.

I can understand why a rabbi would want such allegations to be brought before a rabbinic court. An important part of Jewish tradition is handling legal disputes among their own—after all, it was once wrong for a Jew to bring another Jew into a gentile court.

But times have changed, and beit dins lack the power to criminally punish. Expelling a child molester from the community is not a sufficient remedy. Criminal prosecution is. Today, silence on such matters—and, worse, intimidating victims and witnesses into silence—is certainly not good for the Jews, and is as wrong as dragging a fellow Jew before a gentile court could have ever been.

Read the rest here. And comment below.

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May 11, 2012 | 10:54 am

Gay marriage and Obama’s ‘shaken fist’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

One of President Obama’s spiritual advisers, Joel Hunter, has “had better days” than when Obama announced Wednesday his support for gay marriage. But that’s nothing compared to how Franklin Graham felt.

A day after the state Graham calls home passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the son of evangelical leader Billy Graham said that Obama had “shaken his fist” at God.

The Charlotte Observer reports:

“It grieves me that our president would now affirm same-sex marriage, though I believe it grieves God even more,” Graham said in a prepared statement.

“This is a sad day for America. May God help us.”

This is a pretty measured and unsurprising response from Graham. Frankly, I was expecting a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. But, as with California’s brief legalization of same-sex marriage, God is not about to smite us because gays are allowed (or might be allowed) to make a commitment recognized by the state.

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May 9, 2012 | 12:51 pm

Obama finally, unequivocally backs same-sex marriage

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

After two years of “evolving” thoughts on same-sex marriage, President Obama today gave unequivocal support for legalizing gay marriage.

In an interview with ABC News, Obama said:

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama told Roberts in an interview to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday.

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“It’s interesting, some of this is also generational,” the president continued. “You know when I go to college campuses, sometimes I talk to college Republicans who think that I have terrible policies on the economy, on foreign policy, but are very clear that when it comes to same-sex equality or, you know, sexual orientation, that they believe in equality. They are much more comfortable with it. You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.”

More here.

Obama’s comments, which many saw as long overdue, come on the heels of North Carolina voters passing a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage—the 30th state to adopt such a ban.

On this one, I agree with Obama. And religious folks should too. As I wrote after voting no on California’s Proposition 8:

Yes or no I could find a Christian minister to support my vote. But on an issue like same-sex marriage, I don’t think it matters whether I believe God is bothered by homosexuality. Proposition 8 has to do with fundamental rights—limiting them, that is. Marriage, despite what we always hear, is not a religious convention. It is a cultural convention. And the words “sanctity of marriage,” to my mind, have more to do with tax breaks and hospital visitation than ordaining a relationship before God.

As an evangelical Christian—as someone who, uncomfortable as it is to sometimes say this, reads in the Bible that homosexuality is a “perversion”—I don’t believe it is the job of government to legislate based on religion. We’ve seen how that works out.

Simply allowing gays to marry is about equality—it requires only action by the state, not by ministers or others who are opposed to participating in gay marriage ceremonies.

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May 8, 2012 | 6:31 pm

Voters pass N.C. constitutional amendment banning gay marriage*

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Polls in North Carolina have closed, and I’ve seen unconfirmed reports that Amendment 1, the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (which already is prohibited in North Carolina), has passed.

Earlier today, the NYT had this to say about the ballot measure:

he vote has been hotly debated in the state: over $3 million has been spent on the rival campaigns, ministers have formed coalitions pushing for and against passage, cities have passed resolutions condemning the measure, former President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Billy Graham have weighed in on opposite sides and law professors have skirmished over the consequences.

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While public opinion is shifting rapidly across the country and same-sex marriage continues to achieve legal recognition state by state, polls in North Carolina have shown a narrowing but comfortable margin for passage.

For backers of gay marriage, this news comes as no surprise.

*UPDATE: Reports are no longer unconfirmed. Here’s what the AP is reporting:

North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday defining marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman, making it the 30th state to adopt such a ban.

With 35 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday, unofficial returns showed the amendment passing with about 58 percent of the vote to 42 percent against.

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