Homosexuality, Ethics and Halacha

Yosef, with your post you brought us into a very difficult project. What you REALLY want to talk about are foundational issues in ethics and halacha, to discuss that relationship. However you want to use the instance of homosexuality to frame this discussion. OK--I accept your framing device, but in the future (for the sake of clarity and organization) I'm going to try to limit my posts to specific points and limited theses. I'll let Michael (the moderator) take care of sorting this mess out.

So, Yosef, you asked me if I am "troubled by what the Torah says about homosexuality?" Troubled? We need to narrow that down a bit. When I see war and death and hunger and famine and death and war and death, I'm troubled theologically. How could a good God allow human suffering? In the Torah we sometimes have mitzvot that cause human suffering, and the prohibition against homosexuality is one of these. So, yeah in that sense it troubles me. That's an expression of my capacity for empathy, though.

But I'm not troubled by a conflict between my personal morality and the Torah/halacha. Now, Yosef, you know that I'm not as philosophically sophisticated as you are (and that's just fine, because you have no idea how to run a gel or model gene fixation). However, I don't really see how you can have a moral objection to the Torah while still sustaining a belief in the Torah's divinity. I'll admit that I'm starting with the divinity of the Torah and moving from there; I have reasons for my belief that halacha represents the will of God. So I think that there can not possibly be anything in the Torah that is immoral.

And I think that one can make a good case that a prohibition against homosexuality is not immoral. First of all, everybody has temptations, and the prohibition is only against action. Action is up to you. And if you have strong desires, and you succumb to your temptations, then God will judge you--man should withhold judgment. But I fail to see how homosexuality is a bigger problem than kleptomania, from an Orthodox Jewish perspective. Second, is it really so clear to you that homosexuals are unable to have meaningful heterosexual relationships? I'll look into this some more, but I thought that the research was mixed.

But since, Yosef, you mostly want this to be a way to get to the issues of ethics and halacha more generally, I'll stake out the following position: while there might be ethical requirements beyond the requirements of halacha (like the famous Ramban a"ht which describes how one can be a moral failure while still keeping all of halacha), the Torah can never be immoral. Hence, the Torah's prohibition on homosexuality must be moral, and we can even think of non-halachic arguments to defend that position.