The Supreme Court of Israel has ordered the government to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other countries.
This may appear to be unusual in that it requires a country to recognize a marriage that isn’t legal in that country. However, in this matter Israel already has established precedent and custom.
The rabbinate has a monopoly over Jewish marriage and divorce in Israel. Those citizens who wish for a civil marriage rather than a religious marriage cannot do so in Israel. So they go abroad, marry, and register the marriage with the nation. If, for example, a protestant Christian couple did not wish to go through Catholic Court, or a Muslim man wished to marry a Jewish woman, or even a Jewish couple did not want an Orthodox wedding, they would have to do so in another country.
In that context, this ruling does not seem bizarre. The court simply said that a distinction cannot be made in registering foreign weddings based on the sex or sexual orientation of the partners (ie. no special rights for heterosexuals).
Naturally, the ultra-Orthodox in Israel trotted out the extremist rhetoric to condemn the Court decision.
“We don’t have a Jewish state here. We have Sodom and Gomorrah here,” said Moshe Gafni, an ultra-Orthodox lawmaker, referring to two cities the Bible said was destroyed because their citizens were so sinful.
“I assume that every sane person in the State of Israel, possibly the entire Jewish world, is shocked, because the significance is… the destruction of the family unit in the State of Israel,” Gafni told Army Radio.
Gafni clearly is not aware of the sentiment in the American Jewish community (or perhaps he thinks Reform Jews and secular Jews are not sane). He also misses the irony that it was the rigid control of Orthodox Judaism on the marriage process within the state of Israel that created the loophole he so despises.
We should anticipate that anti-gay activists will soon be seeing signs of Armageddon in this new happening in the Holy Land. The chance to defame gay people and accuse them of attacking the religions of the world is too juicy for them to forego.
We will use this opportunity to see how the ex-gay ministries and their leaders respond. Will they recognize this as a political decision made in a foreign country, or will they see this as an opportunity to make false claims about gay men and women?
Very clever. I wondered how they were going to beat the ultra-Orthodox there. Israel is a strange country when it comes to these matters. They let the Orthodox control such matters as conversion to Judaism, marriage, etc., while most of the country is essentially Reform or Reconstructionist.
The Knesset had previously also ruled to recognize non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism done outside of Israel, so this is in keeping with previous approaches to getting around the Orthodox. The control over all religious matters (including marriage, burial, circumcision, etc.) was given to the Orthodox as a compromise when the State was first forming so that the rest of the government could be secular and not the Torah based government that the Orthodox wanted.
I foresee many an Israeli couple going on vacation in Spain…
Or he just doesn’t consider them Jews.