There I stood, 13 and terrified. At Beth Torah Congregation in Toronto, on a bimah that my grandfather had literally helped build, I was chanting from a Torah scroll that his father had saved from their synagogue in eastern Poland and smuggled through the war \u2013 the same parchment from which my father, uncles and cousins had all read in turn.<\/p>\n
The congregation\u2019s eyes seemed to bore tiny holes into my skull as I read the most infamous words of my Torah portion, Acharei Mot: \u201cThou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bathed in family history and tradition, I thought I was about to drown. I may not have been the first gay shlemazel to have to swallow the words of Leviticus 18:22 during his bar mitzvah, but as the text passed my lips, I still felt completely alone.<\/p>\n
The following year, as I was beginning to come out to my family and friends, the Supreme Court of Canada told an evangelical Christian university that it was free to exclude gays from its teacher education program. More than a decade later, the same university, Trinity Western, is invoking that ruling \u2013 and my bar mitzvah portion \u2013 as it claims the right to open an anti-gay law school.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re wrong, and anyone who truly cares about religious freedom should say so.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s far from clear that the Supreme Court\u2019s 2001 decision \u2013 written, as it was, at a different time and on different facts \u2013 still empowers Trinity Western to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Yet, even if it does, the university\u2019s anti-gay policy makes a mockery of freedom of religion. It\u2019s one thing for people of faith to believe that gays are doomed to eternal hellfire, but it\u2019s quite another to exclude them from a law school on that basis.<\/p>\n
Read a Christian Bible cover to cover. It doesn\u2019t end well for the Jews, either. Still, those of us who don\u2019t accept Jesus Christ as lord and savior are welcome at Trinity Western University \u2013 provided that we don\u2019t sleep with anyone of the same sex while we\u2019re there.<\/p>\n
If allowing Jewish students to practise Judaism isn\u2019t a threat to Trinity Western\u2019s religious freedom, what\u2019s so different about allowing gay students to be gay? After all, according to evangelical Christians, we\u2019re all going to end up shvitzing in the same place.<\/p>\n
Imagine if the university required Jewish students to promise to abstain from Judaism. If that isn\u2019t discrimination, neither was the Spanish Inquisition.<\/p>\n
Can Christian scripture provide a basis for homophobia? Of course it can. Look no further than Leviticus 18:22. But the same set of texts might just as readily forgive racism, slavery or antisemitism. Why doesn\u2019t Trinity Western discriminate against Jews or blacks the way it discriminates against gays? Because only fanatics would ever accept religious excuses for the former, and nothing does more to discredit religious freedom than using it to justify bigotry.<\/p>\n
Anti-gay discrimination should be no exception. Those of us who depend on freedom of religion to protect our own beliefs should be the first to condemn its misuse. That doesn\u2019t mean asking Christians (or Jews, or Muslims) to ignore scripture that prohibits homosexuality \u2013 though many do, and more should \u2013 but it does require us never to condone its use as a basis for odious discrimination. After centuries of blood libel, Jews are only too familiar with intolerance preached from the pulpit.<\/p>\n
Those words that darkened my bar mitzvah portion \u2013 \u201cv\u2019et zachar lo tishkav mishk\u2019vei ishah to\u2019evah hu<\/em>\u201d \u2013 are chanted in synagogues around the world each year. After more than a decade, they still sting.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t rewrite Leviticus, nor can we force the faithful to overlook passages that give us pause. But that doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t distinguish religious belief from religious pretext. If freedom of religion can justify almost anything, then it will be good for almost nothing. It\u2019s up to those of us who need it to defend it from itself.<\/p>\n Adam Goldenberg <\/strong>is a Kirby Simon Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School, a former Liberal speechwriter and a contributor to<\/em> CBC News: The National. Follow him at twitter.com\/adamgoldenberg. This article originally appeared in the<\/em> Canadian Jewish News and is reprinted with permission. For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There I stood, 13 and terrified. At Beth Torah Congregation in Toronto, on a bimah that my grandfather had literally helped build, I was chanting from a Torah scroll that his father had saved from their synagogue in eastern Poland and smuggled through the war \u2013 the same parchment from which my father, uncles and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1177,1176,1180,1178,1179],"class_list":["post-3825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-acharei-mot","tag-beth-torah-congregation","tag-homophobia","tag-leviticus-1822","tag-trinity-western-university"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}